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Impressions

While the reference design 9600 GT looks a lot like a standard 8800 GT, the Palit GeForce 9600GT Sonic looks like like neither. The first thing you'll notice about the 9600GT Sonic is its rather startling, attention-grabbing orange plastic 'cage' that encloses the video card. While the reference design 9600GT has a single-slot design, the 9600GT Sonic is definitely a double-width card. 

From what I can see, the plastic cage does little to direct the cooling air coming from the fan towards the surface of the PCB. Instead of directing hot air out of the rear of your card (and out of your case), air flows from the fan in all directions. This isn't necessarily a bad thing as the heatsink on this card appears quite capable of achieving the requisite cooling; it has numerous lengthy aluminum heat fins, attached to the GPU by a layer of copper. The cooling is further assisted by two copper heat pipes running through the fins.

Back to the orange cage for a moment though -- it does seem a little unnecessary due to its size. Depending on your motherboard, you may have to reposition your SATA connectors. Furthermore, the cage might make a perfect prison for dust bunnies, which are known to frequent computer cases.

Size-wise, the Palit GeForce 9600GT Sonic is large for a mid-range card. It has a length the 8800GT, coming in at just over 22 cm's.

On left: XFX 8800 GTS 512, Palit 9600GT Sonic, VisionTek HD3870      On right: XFX 8800 GTS 512, Palit 9600GT Sonic, XFX 8800 GT .

Specifications

The chart above lays out the vital numbers within the tight competition of the current mid-range cards. As you can see, our Palit 9600GT Sonic is a factory-overclocked card. Palit will be selling a non-overclocked 9600GT with a smaller heatsink, but for many, those beefy increases to the clock speeds -- and the superior cooler -- will be very tempting for the extra $30 or so.

The 9600GT is DirectX 10.0 compatible, has Shader Model 4.0 support, and is a PCI Express 2.0 card. And similar to most of the cards from the 'old' 8th generation cards, the 9600GT features NVIDIA's PureVideo HD decoder, which improves HD playback, and unloads the processing of HD content off of your CPU, and onto your GPU. 

Take a look at all those ports! Palit did a nice job here: in addition to the standard 2 DVI ports, there is also a HDMI port, and a SPDIF port for audio. And new for the 9600GT, we now have a DisplayPort. as well. Get used to these DisplayPorts, as they are going to be come the new 'de facto' interface standard for digital displays. Designed by VESA, one DisplayPort is capable of higher performance than a dual link DVI interface, and can carry audio signals as well.