The 9600GT earns itself a new thermal solution known as the TM62, engineered by none other than the guys at CoolerMaster. Rather well built, we dissected the TM62 for a shot or two. Victim? Inno3D's vanilla 9600GT cooler. As expected, the cooler is pretty much similar to the 8800GT's stock cooler.

Heatpipes are soldered to the fins, which are angled to dump air diagonally.

We're glad to see that NVIDIA has included a large diameter axial blower for the 9600GT. After the noise problem in single slot coolers for early 8800GT releases, they'd be damned not to have learnt their lesson. With PWM control of the blower, NVIDIA has succeeded in proving the TM62 an effective, relatively quiet thermal solution.

31 fins line up on the TM62 cooler.

There exists room for improvement in thermal interface. A better contact would show little heatsink compound residue.

GPU die is heatpipe cooled, common in current generation midend and highend graphics accelerators.

I'm pretty sure Merlin has retired, because these days, Magic is actually Made-in-China.

Below is the temperatures logged over three 3DMark06 loops. Highest temperatures recorded are shown, representative of the peak load temperatures experienced by the GPU onboard thermal senseor. Please ignore clockspeed readings as they are misread in the monitoring window of RivaTuner at the moment.

Not surprisingly, the winner was the Sonic with it's two-slot cooler. Notice that even amongst the reference designs, temperature differences exist. Silicon tolerance plays an important role deciding how hot things run.