Introduction

When I was younger, I didn’t much care about noise and noise didn’t bother me because, like many, I believed that louder was cooler. How many of you had a minimum of three Vantec Tornado’s in your computer case? I swear you could hear them a block away from your house. The Tornado boasted 130 CFM airflow but was as loud as a jet engine by itself. So just imagine having three. Now that I have grown out of that stage, I have come to believe that a fan does not have to be loud to cool efficiently.

My belief is that a good heatsink and fan combination for cooling a CPU or video card is the right combination. A heatsink that absorbs and dissipates heat well, while being enhanced by a quiet, efficient fan, can be the difference between long life or an untimely RMA of either component.

For gamers, keeping the GPU cool is of utmost importance and with only two (air cooling) options, stock or aftermarket, you will need to choose wisely before making an investment in a new video card. Let’s face it, years ago if you wanted to game or overclock your GPU, you needed an aftermarket heatsink/fan combination. In the past few years, manufacturers have realized this and have been producing their own combinations to help alleviate the cost of purchasing an aftermarket cooler.

The MSI N250GTS 2D1G OC is a video card with such a cooler, on this card you will not find the stock cooler that you may find on a NVIDIA reference board. On the MSI N250GTS 2D1G OC you’ll find that MSI has replaced it with a four heatpipe heatsink and cooling fan. The MSI N250GTS 2D1G OC is a preoverclocked version of the 1GB Geforce GTS 250, clock speeds are set to 760MHz on the core and 2300 MHz on the memory.