Noise, Temperature, Overclockability and Compatibility

The cooling system of the ASUS EN9600GT Top 512MB differs greatly from the reference cooler and may be different in terms of noisiness.

We checked this out with a digital sound-level meter Velleman DVM1326 using A-curve weighing. The level of ambient noise in our lab was 36dBA and the level of noise at a distance of 1 meter from the working testbed with a passively cooled graphics card inside was 43dBA. Here are the results:

Thanks to its large diameter and low fan speed the Glaciator is nearly silent in comparison with the reference cooler. The fan speed is constant irrespective of load.

The Glaciator’s performance is impressive: the core temperature is 35-37°C in idle mode and 48°C under load. For comparison, the GeForce 9600 GT is 46°C and 62°C hot when idle and under load, respectively.

The efficient cooler said its word when we overclocked the card. The highest GPU frequency the card was stable at was 810/2025MHz. It is considerably better than what we achieved with the Gainward card that employed a nonstandard cooler, too. The lack of cooling elements on the memory chips prevented the latter from beating the 1100 (2200) MHz barrier typical of K4J52324QE-BJ1A series chips.

The EN9600GT Top 512MB proved to be perfectly compatible with every PCI Express 1,0a and 1.1 mainboard we tried it with.