Nvidia's reference design made it possible for a passive cooler to exist on regular 7600 GS since core clock speeds were set at a relatively low 400 Mhz, but Gigabyte decided to bump up their core speed to 450 Mhz. The 600 GS also sports 5 vertex shaders, 12 pixel shaders and 12 texture units. The increase in speed is relatively minor, so while it will help a bit with framerates during gaming, it isn't high enough to overload the passive cooler. It does make it hot though which I'll get to later. For the RAM on this board, Gigabyte used Hynix DDR2 memory chips rated for 2.5ns which run at 800Mhz and do not have much room for overclocking.