Also, the 9600 Pro reviews are already out. Basically it uses an RV350 core, which is a modified R300/R350 core. The only differences are that it has half the number of pixel pipelines(4 vs 8), manufactured under a 0.13u process(vs 0.15u), has an optimized 128-bit memory bus(vs 256-bit), has an improved HyperZ engine for higher compression ratios(8:1 vs 6:1) and is clocked faster(400/300MHz vs 380/340 and 325/310). All these changes are interesting to 3D performance but not to the HTPC crowd.
The regular 9600 is just a slower clocked version of the 9600 Pro(325/200). The video hardware and RAMDACs shouldn't be any different from its higher end brothers the 9700/9800 series, but feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.
Also, while a cooler card wouldn't perform better, it will have more headroom in stability. If you put a lesser cooling solution on it that isn't sufficient to keep the temperatures below a certain limit, it will lead to reduced longevity, visual artifacts, and in the worst case crashes. While the Zalman heatpipe cooler is sufficient for the 9700 Pro, nobody has yet tested it with the 9800 Pro. Again, feel free to correct me if I'm wrong here.