Cooling System

The increased clock rates mean that the MSI card consumes more power and produces more heat that the reference card. Even though this is not critical for the RV630 chip, MSI decided to equip it with a rather advanced cooling system.

The cooler represents the classic dual-slot design with a heat pipe. Exhausting the hot air out of the system case, it resembles the cooler from the ATI Radeon X1950 XTX, but is somewhat smaller and has a fan with a peculiarly shaped impeller.

The base and heatsink of the cooler are aluminum. The only copper element is the nickel-plated heat pipe. The photo shows the thick dark-gray thermal grease typical of top-performance graphics cards and rubber spacers on the fastening poles. The rather small heatsink consists of thin profiled plates that are fastened to each other with the jutting pieces. It is mounted on the base and connected to it with the heat pipe that ensures a uniform distribution of heat to increase the overall efficiency of the cooler. The memory chips on the front side of the PCB are cooled with an L-shaped ribbed plate. The chips on the reverse side of the PCB are cooled by means of natural convection.

Judging by the fan marking, its max power is 2.76W. The nine blades have a queer S-like shape and are getting thicker towards the ends. We haven’t seen such fans before. The fan has a 3-wire connection with an output of the velocity sensor. The whole arrangement is covered with a profiled casing made from translucent red plastic that drives the air through the heatsink to the slits in the mounting plate and out of the system case. The cooler is fastened to the PCB by means of four nuts and an X-shaped back-plate. The heatsink on the memory chips is fastened with three screws.

Representing a time-tested design, this cooler should deliver high performance at low noise. It may even increase the overclocking potential of the MSI RX2600XT Diamond 512. The only downside is the height of the cooler that may prevent you from installing the card into a compact system case. On the other hand, the ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT GDDR4 has a too large PCB to start with, which makes it incompatible with small system cases.