Passive GeForce 9600 GTs have been done before by NVIDIA's other partners, but ZOTAC reckons that its interpretation, due to be launched next month, is how to do it correctly.
Representatives were keen to point out that competing products had suffered from burn-out issues and that designing a passively-cooled version necessitated more than just slapping a large-as-you-can-find heatsink on top.
Dissipating the heat from the mid-range GPU, ZOTAC employs a double-sided cooler that concurrently cools the memory chips.
The double-height cooler will take up a second slot, of course, but ZOTAC reckons that the under-load temperature, in a chassis with little airflow, is around 90°C.
It's interesting to see a graphics-card company eschew the now-traditional heatpipe-based approach for some old-fashioned cooling.
GeForce 9600 GT is a breadwinning SKU for NVIDIA, and ZOTAC hopes to cash in with a design that panders to those who prefer silence over all-out performance.
