Board analysis

As you can see in the pictures, MSI outfits their GeForce GTS 250 card with a custom cooling solution designed in-house by MSI. In fact we’ve seen it previously on their Radeon 4850 cards and GeForce 9800 GT cards.

The cooler uses quad copper heatpipes to pull heat off the G92b GPU. Each heatpipe is over 8” in length, and 6mm thick. By using such large heatpipes the cooler is able to dissipate heat more effectively: MSI claims their use of thicker heatpipes improves cooling effectiveness by 20% in comparison to typical 5mm heatpipes. These heatpipes are then soldered to a copper base, which rests directly over the G92b GPU.


Thanks to their copper design, the heatpipes are capable pulling quite a bit of heat off the GPU. This heat must then be dispersed in order to prevent the heatpipes themselves from becoming a hotspot on the graphics card. To accomplish this, MSI employs a dual-slot aluminum heatsink. Heat from the heatpipes is transferred to this heatsink, which is composed of 33 fins. MSI actually welds the heatpipes to the dual-slot heatsink: it isn’t a pass-through design where the heatpipes merely go through the heatsink. This welded design improves heat dissipation. Each fin is slightly over 7” long, and ½” thick. Heat from the heatpipes is dispersed along the entire length of these fins. Employing such a large heatsink increases its surface area, and thus increases the effectiveness of the cooler.

Finally, supplying the heatpipes and heatsink with fresh cool air is an 80mm fan. By using such a large fan (most case fans measure 80mm), the cooler is able to supply a large amount of air without having to resort to spinning up to high RPMs. The fan spins up to 3500RPMs at its highest setting.

This helps to keep noise output down to a minimum. Even under extended 3D load, you can barely hear the fan. MSI claims the fan generates up to 32dB of noise; in our testing we got a reading of 46.7dB for the entire system – not bad.

Because the duct used on MSI’s N250GTS-2D1G GeForce GTS 250 card isn’t completely enclosed, air from the GPU cooling isn’t forced out the back of your case. Instead the air is pushed out the sides of the cooler. MSI does this in order for the air to cool down the power circuitry and the board’s memory modules. Here we should note that the memory modules aren’t cooled by the dual-slot heatsink or RAMsinks, but the Hynix memory modules MSI uses are technically rated for speeds up to 1.2GHz anyway, so cooling isn’t technically needed in order for the modules to operate properly.


To finish off the cooling system, MSI adds a massive gold-colored aluminum heatsink to cool the board’s MOSFETs. The heatsink sports curved fins and is designed to fit seamlessly underneath the dual-slot GPU heatsink.

Supercharged clock speeds

To improve performance, MSI overclocks their GeForce GTS 250 board from the factory. The card’s graphics core is clocked at 760MHz, an improvement of 22MHz over the stock GeForce GTS 250 reference speeds, while the stream processors operate at the stock GTS 250 speed of 1836MHz. Finally, the board’s memory is OC’ed 50MHz to 1150MHz (2300MHz effective).

On the surface these speeds look a little tame, but actually in comparison to other GeForce GTS 250 boards that have been announced to date MSI’s speeds are pretty comparable to the competition. For instance, EVGA’s own GTS 250 Superclocked has higher core/shader speeds, but slower memory speed in comparison to MSI’s GeForce GTS 250.

Video outputs

Moving around to the backplate of MSI’s GeForce GTS 250, we see that the card ships with two dual-link DVI adapters. No TV-output connector is present on the card.

Because of this, support for standard TVs connected via S-Video or component video cable is out. If you wish to hook the card up to your HDTV you’ll have to use the DVIs or the DVI-to-HDMI adapter that comes bundled with the card.

Accessories

In addition to the standard driver CD and manual, MSI ships the card with one DVI-to-VGA adapter, a DVI-to-HDMI adapter, and 6-pin PCIe power connector.