Vvikoo card sports full copper jacket 9600GT Turbo

Product: Vvikoo 9600GT Turbo
Website: www.vvikoo.com
Price: ?200

THIS LAST GENERATION of GPUs ? and the general attitude GPU-makers have towards their AIB partners ? has definitely put a different spin on the whole graphics card market. AIB partners can essentially have their way with graphics cards with the blessing of the GPU maker. This essentially puts companies like Vvikoo on par with giants like Asus, MSI, XFX or eVGA.

Sure tier-one AIB partners get in lorry-loads of chips first, but when it comes to engineering something unique, they are on a level playing field. You can stick three MXM modules on a card and watercool it, but just how viable is that in retail ? not to mention aftersales support and warranties? That’s why Vvikoo slaps a sensibly solid Zalman VF1000 GPU cooler on its card, overclocks it a bit, puts it in a nice box and calls it the Vvikoo 9600GT Turbo. Voil?!

The 9600GT Turbo clocks in at 700MHz core / 1000MHz memory, that’s 50/100MHz over the reference Nvidia design thanks to the increased heat dissipation provided by the Zalman cooler. The 512MB of GDDR3 are rated 1ns and are pasted on a 256 bit bus ? pretty standard stuff but, then again, that’s the secret.

The cooler bits
The Zalman VF1000 is a full copper heatpipe+fan that covers most of the card ? but doesn’t actually come into physical contact with the memory modules (Vvikoo said they were pretty confident you wouldn’t need such a thing). It kind of hovers in place. The cooler and card are securely held together by a length of copper that covers the card’s side ? without this backbone, the (four) heatpipes would effectively hang in the air, subject to any stress.

Connection-wise you get the whole shebang: HDMI, DisplayPort, 2xDVI (with dual link capability) and Toslink for HD audio. Since the bracket is dual-slotted, these are conveniently stacked/spread out.

We won’t recommend installing this card on a mobo outside of a solid box, as it weighs about three metric tonnes and can put quite some stress on the PCIe slot. Apart from that it’s a simple matter of jacking in your 6-pin PCIe power connector at the far edge of the card, plugging in your choice of graphics connector and you’re set. Time to boot up.

*Click*... *whoosh*... *hummmm*. In that order. The fan speeds up, speeds down and then revs at a fairly silent level. It’s quite silent and only after a really prolonged period of gaming does it whine. However, if you have a decent case we’re pretty sure you won’t hear it at all. For a fairly small fan, it does displace quite a lot of air; you can feel it quite easily. The card’s bracket has a small vent grill where the card can vent outside the box.

The numbers
Now onto a little bit of benchmarking. Although the card ships with its driver disk et al the only piece of software we pulled out was the VTune. It’s a basic overclocking and monitoring tool that installs with the card and starts up at boot time. You can click away at a few options, and easily get a little bit more out of the card ? but its primary function here is to monitor and control the fan speed and core temps.

Here are a few piccies of what the card can do in a host of games and benchmarks:

These were all performed at stock speeds.

The OC

When we got to overclocking we had a pleasant surprise. The Vvikoo 9600GT Turbo overclocks quite well, for an already OC’d GPU, stably chewing away frames at 820MHz core/2050MHz shader/1100 memory.

The VTune tool works but it’s like flying blind because of its inability to detect an unstable overclock (pushing the slider to the max it just “tests” the setting and allows it to apply, later on creating artifacts and/or crashing). It isn’t the best tool out there but, with a little trial and error, things became stable at the values above. Crysis was my target here. Although the card was clocked higher ? and we’re running this on a QX9770 processor ? things became much smoother, as you can see in the graph below.

Minimum frame rates in Crysis jumped 50 per cent - from 20.47fps to 30.76fps... but maximum framerates changed very little (less than two per cent). However, if you think about it, it’s a smooth ride all the way.

So what’ll it be?
Overall the 9600GT Turbo delivers some very high marks ? impressive even ? some of them match 8800GT cards, others actually top them (especially if you’re doing the tests OC’d). If you SLI this thing (getting these cards might be their only problem) then you can effectively trump very high-end cards like the 9800GTX or (maybe) a GX2, at least from what we’ve seen these perform elsewhere.

Vvikoo has done a great job on this card, with a simple upgrade to a reference design. Temps on the card varied very little. At idle, it was cool to the touch and registered just 20 celsius ? although we work in a pretty cold place. After running 3DMark06 for a couple of hours, temps had just doubled. We thought that was quite odd, as the 8600GT sitting on the bench idles at 40-something Celsius and goes all the way up to the top 60s when under load. The Zalman cooler really does a stellar job keeping the card cooled.

The software bundle isn’t that shiny and interesting but, quite honestly, we can’t hold it against Vvikoo. We don’t buy cards to play the game that ships in the box, we get a new card to play the absolutely mind-blowing game that one gets from the store (unless, of course, we’re talking about SupCom).

Tomb Raider Anniversary isn’t what we’d call the latest and greatest game out there, but if you grew up on Tomb Raider breast milk, you’ll appreciate the nostalgic remake of Lara Croft’s adventures.

We’ve had the card installed for a while now. It’s been running Crysis at 1920x1200 at medium settings and we can’t complain about performance. Actually it’s quite mind-blowing as we have a Gigabyte 8600GT here and the difference really is quite dramatic when it comes to performance.

It does look like Vvikoo is putting out products with good value and what is essentially a modicum of enthusiast appeal. The Zalman cooler is a great asset here, and everything (except maybe the software bundle), hits the spot. Pricing may vary, but Vvikoo told us this one will run for approximately 200 ?urobucks (I won’t risk converting that to dollars). It isn’t cheap for a mainstream card, but it does deliver performance very much beyond the mainstream.

Although there are plenty of 9600GT cards floating around on the world wide wibble, we haven’t seen anything quite like this one.

The Good
Aftermarket coolers are useful, full copper ones even more so. A VF1000 is in a class of its own.

The Bad
A single slot design becomes a dual slot design, just like that.

The Ugly
Availability. Not many etailers carry this brand.

Bartender’s Verdict