Custom Cooled Video Card Shootout: ASUS & MSI

by Marco Chiappetta — Friday, October 16, 2009, 12:47 PM EDT

One of the sub-categories cropping up amongst OEMs are videos cards which feature highly customized cooling along with special controller chips or other functionality that help facilitate tweaking the card's performance. These cards all have a few things in common. First, they all mount beefy and often very radical cooling designs which are a distinct departure from the ATI / NVIDIA approved reference cooler designs. They also offer some form of advanced tweaking features either in software, firmware or hardware (or perhaps all 3), that a stock reference design wouldn't possess, such as fan and voltage control.

The tweaker-friendly video card segment seems to be getting more popular as more OEMs are producing custom cards that fit the mold. We're going to give you a peak into what makes these cards special by giving you the run-down on three available options which are excellent representatives of what the segment currently has to offer.

Custom Cooled Video Card Shootout: ASUS & MSI

MSI R4890 Cyclone SOC, ASUS ROG ENGTX260 Matrix, ASUS ROG Matrix GTX285

Tags: Asus, MSI, Radeon, GeForce, Gaming, graphics, GPU, ROG, Matrix, Cyclone

Marco Chiappetta

Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com