ASUS EN9600GT Silent review

If there's one thing that's always likely to pique our interest when it comes to reviewing video cards here at Elite Bastards, its boards that sport silent cooling solutions.  While many users are content to always shoot for maximum performance and are none too bothered by occasionally noisy cooling solutions, there are a significant number of people who would far rather look towards creating a silent or near-silent system for their needs.  Of course, with increases in performance normally also meaning increases in power and heat, it can often be tough to balance performance with silence, hence our interest whenever a new passively cooled graphics board crops up.

It seems like an age since we last visited ASUS' range of silent graphics boards, when we took a look at both their EN8600GT and EN8600GTS Silent parts.  Well, ASUS have now done it again using NVIDIA's far more impressive latest mid-range offering, the GeForce 9600 GT, meaning that what we have here is a silent cooler matched with a really rather attractive level of performance.  Could this be something of a holy grail for users hoping to pick up a passively cooled graphics board?  Read on, and see what we make of it.