MSI N550GTX-Ti Cyclone II OC Temperatures

Benchmark tests are always nice, so long as you care about comparing one product to another. But when you're an overclocker, gamer, or merely a PC hardware enthusiast who likes to tweak things on occasion, there's no substitute for good information. Benchmark Reviews has a very popular guide written on Overclocking Video Cards, which gives detailed instruction on how to tweak a graphics cards for better performance. Of course, not every video card has overclocking head room. Some products run so hot that they can't suffer any higher temperatures than they already do. This is why we measure the operating temperature of the video card products we test.

To begin my testing, I use GPU-Z to measure the temperature at idle as reported by the GPU. Next I use FurMark's "Torture Test" to generate maximum thermal load and record GPU temperatures at high-power 3D mode. The ambient room temperature remained at a stable 22.5°C throughout testing. FurMark does two things extremely well: drive the thermal output of any graphics processor higher than applications of video games realistically could, and it does so with consistency every time. Furmark works great for testing the stability of a GPU as the temperature rises to the highest possible output. The temperatures discussed below are absolute maximum values, and not representative of real-world performance.

As previously stated my ambient temperature remained at a stable 22.5°C throughout the testing procedure, the cooler is so efficient that a heavy load from FurMark raises the temperature from 25°C (40% fan speed) idle to only 56°C load with an automatic fan speed of 61%. Putting the fan on manual and cranking it up to 100% saw the temperature drop to 53°C and the noise level at max speed is honestly still quite bearable, but not for only a 3°C improvement in temperature.

In the next section we will look at power consumption figures, let's go.

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