XFX 9600 GT XXX Alpha Dog Edition 740M 512mb

 

Last time I looked at the 9600 GT it had a 3rd party cooler installed on it. This time, we’re looking at the stock cooler from XFX. The Alpha Dog edition is based around a black PCB with a card-keeper-esque bracket to make sure that the whole thing doesn’t flex too much.

 

 

 

You’ll notice that the cooler spreads all the way across the memory modules for the card, perhaps because they’re running at a swift 2000Mhz.

 

 

 

XFX have used all high quality Japanese capacitors for the card which gives it an air of quality. The XFX logo on the side of the card also shows a nice level of detail in the card.

 

 

The card requires a single 6PIN PCI-e power.

 

 

The card has two Dual DVI HDCP enabled outputs, as well as the usual TV-out S-Video. This is what we have come to expect, although I was slightly surprised HDMI wasn’t included on the card itself. Still, there’s a converter in the box that works just fine.

 

 

 

The cooler on the XFX 9600 GT Alpha Dog XXX Edition is the stock Nvidia cooler. With a copper base and copper fins it should do the trick to keep the GPU cool. Running at around 35°C idle and 58°C load, the card certainly does keep the GPU cool and does it’s job very well.

 

 

BUT (you knew it was coming!), the cooler is obnoxiously loud at pretty much all times. Recording the sounds at idle and at load I uploaded them for you to hear:

 

 

As you can hear, the card is very loud and even though it is bound to be a little quieter inside a case (the test setup is on a bench), it is whiny enough to get very annoying. This is slightly disappointing considering Nvidia’s partners generally have been doing pretty well keeping these cool cards quiet.