Board analysis

Top of the N5900 Ultra

Back of the card

Slightly slimmer profile

As we just mentioned, MSI has implemented a cooling setup that looks pretty menacing. On the top of the card you’ve got a one-piece copper cooler. The area immediately above the GPU has longer fins for increased surface area, which should help draw heat off the graphics core. Of course, this also means that the PCI slot next to the AGP slot should not be used (physically, a PCI card fits, but it’s a very tight fit). Personally we don’t see this as a huge negative, as most gamers and enthusiasts leave this slot free for better airflow anyway, and the added cooling is always nice.

By going with a one piece cooler, the surface area of the heatsink is increased. But one downside is that the heat being generated by the GPU is passed on to the memory modules as well. This is why GeForce FX 5900 Ultra cards manufactured by NVIDIA feature two piece coolers, one for the GPU, and a separate solution for the memory modules (although the cooling setup on the underside of the card is one piece). To help combat this, MSI has gone with fins that are much thicker than what we’re used to seeing. Manufacturers typically integrate as many thin fins as possible. To increase cooling even further, the copper fins are actually taller on the edges, how’s that for attention to detail!

A closer look at the cooler on the top of the card

Fins are taller on the edges

Two-piece cooling on the bottom

On the underside of the card, MSI relies on a two-piece design. For the underside of the graphics core, the NBox N5900 Ultra sports a heatsink/fan unit that looks like it’s been borrowed straight from the GeForce FX 5200-based FX5200-VTDR128. The heatsink itself is considerably smaller than the heatsink on the top of the card, although both are made of copper.

For cooling the 128MB of memory on the bottom of the card, a separate copper heatsink is used. We see thick fins on this heatsink as well, although fin height is uniform.

Since the heatsink/fan unit on the underside of the graphics core protrudes just over half an inch from the bottom of the graphics card, we do have some concerns about size. Quite simply, there may be some motherboards out there that don’t fit properly with the NBox N5900 Ultra. For instance, we had to bend a few fins on the North Bridge of DFI’s LANPARTY PRO875 for the card to fit properly; this is also the case for older revisions of the ASUS P4C800 Deluxe (ours is a 1.03 board). Motherboards based on older Intel chipsets had more space between the chipset’s North Bridge and the AGP interface, so spacing shouldn’t be an issue. nForce2 motherboards should also work perfectly.

The entire apparatus is held in place with six push pins, and MSI uses a liberal amount of paste to cool the memory modules.

In operation, we found MSI’s cooling system to perform on par thermally with the GeForce FX 5900 Ultra cards manufactured by NVIDIA. MSI claims that their system performs up to eight degrees Celsius better than NVIDIA’s reference card, but we found temperatures to be within a degree or two of NVIDIA at idle and during testing.

As far as noise level, the dual fans MSI uses on the NBox N5900 Ultra are very quiet, as they don’t spin very rapidly. Because of this, the noise level of the N5900 Ultra is actually quieter than the FX5900U-VTD256, which is manufactured by NVIDIA. We still heard the squealing we first reported in the FX5900-TD128 review, although we’re glad to say that it wasn’t as loud or as consistent. It still seems to be a problem that affects some GeForce FX 5900 and GeForce FX 5900 Ultra cards however, regardless of manufacturer.