NVIDIA GTX 550 Ti Cyclone II vs NVIDIA Reference Cooler Fan Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2011-05-08
·
559 words · ~2 min read
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for this video I will be testing
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the temperatures and Acoustics of the
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GTX 550 TI I'll be testing the Cyclone 2
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edition of the card against the reference NVIDIA designed edition of the
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card so the first one I have here on the bench is the reference card so our
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maximum temperature ignore this is
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actually 75° and it looks like it takes
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us about 1,950 RPM or about 49% fan speed in
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order to achieve that temperature so I'm going to get close and I'll let you guys
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have a listen and then I'm going to switch to
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the Cyclone 2 and see how much MSI's cooler improves The Thermals and noise
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characteristics of this video card
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well it looks like this is where we settle for the Cyclone 2
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cooler the max temperature is around
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63° so that makes it a good 10 plus de
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cooler than the reference design however
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it is louder at these settings than the reference cooler was so we're actually
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at a fan speed of about 71% well about 70% exactly 71% and that is a fan RPM of
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around 3,000 RP M so to give us that GPU
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temperature we are paying a bit of a price in terms of noise so what MSI has
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done is they have actually set a more aggressive fan profile than NVIDIA had
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set on their reference card through the BIOS now one of the other things to note
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about these two cards is that besides the GPU temperatures you can see right
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here the mosfets do not have any additional cooling on them right in
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there whereas on the MSI card there's
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actually a metal Heat sink covering the
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vrms now that is very hot to the touch
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and I got to say I would be more comfortable with a card that has ACT or
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has even passive cooling on the vrms and then incidental air flow as well versus
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one that is only counting on incidental air flow from the fan to cool the vrms
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now one thing I'm going to do before we finish this up and this is kind of a new
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thing is I'm going to tweak the fan on the Cyclone 2 to be around the same RPM
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as the stock fan and see what kind of temperatures we get with a similar uh
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speed similar fan speed and similar noise profile so I actually got a far
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more desirable result than I had expected if we relax our GPU uh fan just
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by manually setting the speed so I've set it to
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45% um and that is around 1500 RPM we
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get 75° load temperatures in furmark
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and I mean so turning off the CPU fan here
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that gives us an almost silent
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experience compared to the reference cooler at the same temperature so the
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Cyclone 2 definitely does a better job than the reference cooler whether we're
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looking at silent performance or whether we're looking at sheer performance when
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you go to the max to see what it can do
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so why don't we just see how loud it is at maximum volume just for fun and thank
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you for checking out Linus Tech tips don't forget to subscribe
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