MSI 9600GT Hybrid Freezer

Introduction

While spending a few extra pounds on a more powerful graphics card might seem perfectly acceptable to you, spending an extra few pounds on a quieter graphics card is often considered a bit of a waste. This is generally because you don’t see any visual benefit, and noise reductions are negligible if any. Today MSI have got something rather interesting for us to look at, so we will  be using our ears rather than our eyes for this one.

The cooler used on the 9600GT received is far from stock, and for once it doesn’t appear to just be a third party cooler by one of the common culprits such as Thermaltake or Zalman, but seems to be an in-house design by MSI. This is particularly good, as it means the card and cooler will have been tailor made to integrate with each other, which should give much better results. 

The cooler used is different to others in a couple of ways. First off, it is passive while the card is idle, meaning that whilst you are just browsing the web or downloading files the card will emit no noise whatsoever. Here’s the good bit though, only when gaming and when the card hits a certain temperature will the fan kick in – drastically reducing the use of the fan and the noise emitted by the card.

We couldn’t get any official specs from the MSI website, but here are the basics which were found on the packaging and sourced from GPU-Z:

The overclock is only marginal, with the core speeds up 50mhz from the 9600GT’s 650mhz stock, but it is still a welcome boost. The memory see’s the biggest difference from the stock card, with 1024MB compared to 512MB. Today however, we will not be looking too closely at how well the card performs, but will be focusing on the cooler instead.