Anyone have any experience with passively cooled cards that come that way vs doing the passively cooling yourself?

My eye is on my next card which is the 9600xt. I see it at NewEgg for around $200 with stock passively cooling. I've also seen some deals for a "regular" 9600xt for around $150. My target price for the card is around $150 so I'm getting tempted by the one that comes with a fan.

The problem is that I really don't want to mod the card with one of the coolers you can buy. It's probably easy to the rest of you but I don't trust myself and I don't like the idea of losing my warranty / resale value. But I'm getting tempted by the huge price difference.

I does make me wonder if there is a performance difference between the stock passive cooled card vs the after market passive cooled card.

There isn't a performance difference at all. You'll need good case airflow, when a high-end card uses a purely passive solution, but the equipment is exactly the same. Actually, it's been shown that the Zalman cooler allows better overclocking than the stock heatsink for the 9800/9600 ATI series.

Pretzel, not sure about pricing but see if you can find the http://www.sapphiretech.com/vga/9600-xt-ult.asp (they're impossible/hard to get here in Australia but should be easy where you are).

I think that's the one I'm looking at. NewEgg sells them but they're out of stock last I checked. I'm a bit upset that the 9600xt with passive cooling is $50 US more than the fan cooled version. But if the cooling kits cost around $40 then I guess it's not that far off.

Now if the price would drop some more. I just don't want to spend $200 on a video card.