NVIDIA's GeForce 9 Series was first introduced in February of this year by way of the 9600 GT launch. Admittedly, we thought it was interesting to see a new GeForce series launch, not with the flagship card, but rather with a new midrange offering. It makes perfect sense, though, considering that more people can afford midrange cards than can afford high-end, flagship cards. Since this launch, NVIDIA has added to the GeForce 9 Series by introducing the dual-GPU GeForce 9800 GX2 and the GeForce 9800 GTX. So far, the GeForce 9 Series seems to be another successful line from the NVIDIA camp.In this article, we are going to expand our coverage of the GeForce 9600 GT by doing another round-up of three retail cards: the PNY Verto 9600 GT, the MSI N9600GT OC, and the ASUS EN9600GT SILENT. As you might expect, all three of these cards sport 512MB of GDDR3and a 256-bit memory interface. What you may not expect is how different these three cards actually are. Two feature custom coolers, one of which is passive, making it silent. Because of these custom coolers, these two cards are dual-slot solutions while the third uses the single-slot reference cooler. Only one of them ships with a factory overclock while the other two utilize NVIDIA's reference clocks. We are eager to see how these three cards compare when it comes to performance, noise and heat. Let's jump right in and take a look at the specifications of all three side-by-side.