MSI N260GTX Lightning Black Edition Video Card Review

The Video Card (Cont’d)

The standard cooler was replaced by an aluminum model with two fans and five nickel-plated heat-pipes. We were very curious about the performance from this cooler, as NVIDIA standard coolers are known to be noisy, heavy and not efficient, and this is one aspect that we will be testing on this review.

We removed this cooler from this video card and you can see it in Figure 8.

Figure 8: Cooler.

In Figure 9, you can see the video card with its cooler removed. The cooler does not touch the memory chips, which are cooled down by a big passive heatsink, which is also used to cool down the transistors from the voltage regulator circuit. As mentioned, this video card uses a 10-phase design (click here to understand what this means) with solid caps (longer life-span and immunity from leakage), ferrite chokes (25% less energy loss) and low RDS(on) transistors (less wasted energy).

Figure 9: MSI N260GTX Lightning Black Edition.

In Figure 10, you can see all accessories that come with this video card: the DVI-to-VGA and HDMI-to-DVI adapters mentioned in the previous page, the SPDIF cable to allow the HDMI connector to carry digital audio (click here to understand this subject) and two USB cables for the overclocking panel (AirForce), which we will discuss in the next page.

Figure 10: Accessories.

This video card comes only with one CD. No games
are bundled, which is disappointing, especially because we are talking about a video card that costs a lot more than the regular GTX 260/216.