MSI NX7900GS (Page 1 of 11)
Introduction
A few years ago, if someone mentioned the word ‘passive’ to me it would have conjured up visions of peace-keeping, of someone backing away with their arms in the air saying “Easy tiger, leave it mate….” but maybe used to spend too much time out in town on Friday nights….
These days of course it brings visions of large heat-sinks covered in spiky cooling fins. Of a myriad of super thin leaves all connected together in a solid copper base and more recently, of heat-pipes. Whilst is wasn’t so long ago that heat-pipes were restricted to use on CPU coolers they soon moved onto third-party GPU coolers and this year we have seen an influx of motherboards with heat-pipes to draw heat away from the Northbridge and mosfets. Yes, it seems that heat-pipes are springing up all over the place, and why not? Moving heat from where it’s hot to an area not so thermally sensitive they appear to work very well, especially if combined with a cooling fan of some description. But there’s still that feeling in the back of my mind that passive is always going to be a bit weaker than or not as good as a fan assisted cooling system, almost weedy by comparison.
So it was with some trepidation that we accepted an offer from MSI to take a look at their latest passively cooled graphics card, the NX7900GST2D256EZ. Whilst silent cooling is all well and good, I personally don’t enjoy having a small helicopter revving up and down under my desk, I wouldn’t want to give up a great deal of performance in exchange. After all, you can always wear earphones to hide the noise, you can’t add extra frames to your screen.
So question is, in an effort to give us a super quiet card have MSI had to compromise on performance? Lets have a look.
» Read the next page, ‘Specifications’.