The Passive 7600GT

The box that the 7600GT came in was pretty battered and torn (obviously our couriers hate us), so excuse the lack of pictures of it. Inside the box was the 7600GT itself, a copy of the PC game GT Legends, an S-Video cable, and a multi output cable which slots into the back of the GFX card providing S-Video and phono outputs. There was also a driver CD, manuals, a copy of StarDVD player and a couple of DVI to VGA adapters. All in all it’s a pretty good bundle.

The front of the card has a small steel/aluminum pressed MSI logo piece that covers the copper heatsink beneath. Poking out the top of this are two heatpipes that bend over to the rear of the card where a larger heatsink is sited. Due to the immense amount of copper present on the card, this baby is pretty weighty. Also, as there is a large heatsink on the rear of the card, this 7600GT will occupy two PCI slot, even though it only needs one PCI-e lane.

Like most new graphics cards the PCB is red, and seems to suit the heatsink that is wrapped around it.

At the back of the card there are the usual dual DVI sockets, and another port which connects to the multi plug that MSI provide in the box. The DVI slots can be easily converted to the older VGA standard with the provided adaptors.

The board has the option of the usual fan socket standard, meaning that you could change the heatsink for an active one to get a better overclock. However, that would obviously void the cards silent trait, which is its best selling point.

The card is SLI, and there is the usual notch at the top of the card allowing you to connect two of these cards together to increase your gaming performance (frames per second, not skill unfortunately).In SLI I would imagine that the cards would get a lot hotter than with just one, as there would be less airflow between the cards.