for this video I will be testing
the temperatures and Acoustics of the
GTX 550 TI I'll be testing the Cyclone 2
edition of the card against the reference NVIDIA designed edition of the
card so the first one I have here on the bench is the reference card so our
maximum temperature ignore this is
actually 75° and it looks like it takes
us about 1,950 RPM or about 49% fan speed in
order to achieve that temperature so I'm going to get close and I'll let you guys
have a listen and then I'm going to switch to
the Cyclone 2 and see how much MSI's cooler improves The Thermals and noise
characteristics of this video card
well it looks like this is where we settle for the Cyclone 2
cooler the max temperature is around
63° so that makes it a good 10 plus de
cooler than the reference design however
it is louder at these settings than the reference cooler was so we're actually
at a fan speed of about 71% well about 70% exactly 71% and that is a fan RPM of
around 3,000 RP M so to give us that GPU
temperature we are paying a bit of a price in terms of noise so what MSI has
done is they have actually set a more aggressive fan profile than NVIDIA had
set on their reference card through the BIOS now one of the other things to note
about these two cards is that besides the GPU temperatures you can see right
here the mosfets do not have any additional cooling on them right in
there whereas on the MSI card there's
actually a metal Heat sink covering the
vrms now that is very hot to the touch
and I got to say I would be more comfortable with a card that has ACT or
has even passive cooling on the vrms and then incidental air flow as well versus
one that is only counting on incidental air flow from the fan to cool the vrms
now one thing I'm going to do before we finish this up and this is kind of a new
thing is I'm going to tweak the fan on the Cyclone 2 to be around the same RPM
as the stock fan and see what kind of temperatures we get with a similar uh
speed similar fan speed and similar noise profile so I actually got a far
more desirable result than I had expected if we relax our GPU uh fan just
by manually setting the speed so I've set it to
45% um and that is around 1500 RPM we
get 75° load temperatures in furmark
and I mean so turning off the CPU fan here
that gives us an almost silent
experience compared to the reference cooler at the same temperature so the
Cyclone 2 definitely does a better job than the reference cooler whether we're
looking at silent performance or whether we're looking at sheer performance when
you go to the max to see what it can do
so why don't we just see how loud it is at maximum volume just for fun and thank
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