Temperature

Despite being in a small-form factor (SFF) case, the 9600 GSO maintained very reasonable temperatures. Palit added their own signature to the GeForce 9600 GSO not only by factory overclocking the card, but also designing a unique GPU cooler for the card. The fan on the unit is nearly silent, and the card stays very cool overall.

At 40°C at idle and 56°C under load, the cooler on the Palit GeForce 9600GSO beats that of the Sapphire Radeon HD3870 Toxic. Of course, the Toxic does take the performance crown from the 9600 GSO in many of the Windows benchmarks, and it is clocked slightly faster with a completely difference brand of GPU. Regardless, the card stays cool!