 Gaming gear, no not game gear, gaming gear, like the stuff you need for gaming, can be confusing to buy with all the marketing fluff that gets thrown at gamers. In fact, soon we'll be helping gamers narrow down their chair choices, but today, something a little bit more traditional Linus Tech Tipsy, gaming graphics card shopping. Ensure swift victory with Corsair's highly responsive, lightweight gaming mouse, the Saber RGB. Click now to learn more. Now often the most obvious difference between one video card and another is the cooler. And this can have a tangible impact on the noise from your PC, the lifespan of your card, and even the performance of your gaming rig, thanks to the way that modern graphics cards turbo up their speeds when they're running nice and cool, and throttle them back down when they're overheating. Now, there are marketing names for the coolers used by the various card makers. Windforce, VaporX, DirectCU, etc. etc. And some of them are bound to be a little bit better or worse than others, but today's video is going to tackle this from a broader perspective. How does the OEM style rear exhaust blower design that you'll find on a reference video card, one with a cooler design by AMD or Nvidia, and then simply produced and rebranded by the manufacturer, compare to the open air designs that are typical of a non-reference video card, where they blow the air kind of around in the case, versus blowing it out the rear panel. So let's walk you guys through the test we'll be using. We wanted to examine this from the perspective, not necessarily of the most extreme PC enthusiast, but rather a more typical PC gamer. So, instead of using a Corsair 900D case, we went with a BitFenix Shadow, a mid-tower chassis with decent, but decidedly unexceptional cooling, with 120mm fans at the front and at the rear. On the inside, we didn't do any special cable management. We installed a quad-core Core i7, non-overclocked, on a passively cooled ASUS motherboard, and we installed our power supply fan-side down, so it wouldn't take its own fresh air and exhaust it directly out the back without affecting the other components in our test. For our cards, we chose a GeForce GTX 780 Ti WinForce from Gigabyte, and a reference GTX 780 Ti that we got directly from Nvidia. We chose these cards because, as a high-end card, the 780 Ti generates a fair bit of heat, giving us a worst-case scenario, where the difference in the results will actually be measurable, and because our 780 Ti WinForce uses the same PCB design as our reference card, eliminating board efficiency as a variable. We also overclocked our reference card to put it roughly in line with the rated clock speeds of the WinForce card. Now we tested each configuration at idle and under load with Crysis 3, no unrealistic synthetic benchmarks here, and took temperature readings with our K-type probe at the front intake, rear exhaust, and inside the case near the stock CPU cooler. Then we also took CPU, GPU, motherboard, and motherboard VRM temperatures with ASUS's AI Suite monitoring software and MSI Afterburner. Now normally when we benchmark graphics cards, we do it on an open air test bench for the ease of swapping them in and out, but it appears that we may need to re-evaluate this practice at some point in the future, because while we did still observe lower temperatures and therefore marginally higher boost clocks on our open air graphics card, just like we do on an open bench, the internal temperature of our case, and therefore the temperature of every other component inside went up significantly. We're talking an increase in the neighborhood of about 5 degrees, and on top of all this, the noise advantage that we normally observe with open air coolers was nowhere to be found. Our WinForce card was actually noticeably louder, well the entire system was noticeably louder with our WinForce card than with our reference card. So there you go, non-reference coolers might let your GPU run a little bit cooler, but the rest of your system will run hotter and possibly even louder, unless you take the appropriate precautions. Because remember, this test scenario was designed to show maybe not quite the worst, but a very bad case scenario. A mid-range GPU with a lower TDP will not affect your case temperatures to nearly the same degree. Degree? Like degrees of temperature? Sorry. And adding more cooling fans or using a better ventilated case like a Fractal Arc series, Corsair Graphite series, or Cooler Master Half series would help as well. So the real point here is make sure that you use open air coolers responsibly and work to keep the rest of your case temperatures down. Let us know in the comments if you thought this was interesting, and if you'd like to see us tackle this topic again with maybe a different overall system configuration. And speaking of overall different system configurations, how about ones that are super hyper compact for free? Yes, okay, not everyone gets one for free, but this is the Intel NUC D54-250WYKH. Wow, that is a bit of a tongue twister, and if you're not familiar with the NUC, these things are freaking cool. They're little tiny PCs, like so small you can fit them in your hand, but they're actually fully featured PCs. So you can install SODIMM memory in them, they've got Intel onboard graphics, they've got Intel CPUs, they've got support for USB 3, they've got support for HDMI and DisplayPort out, this particular one has mini DP and mini HDMI out for up to dual displays, and supports gigabit LAN, and finally also has, you know, your built-in sort of sound and all that stuff. So basically they're useful for a ton of different things. If you just need a little tiny PC for basic light use, it'll do for that. If you need a media center PC, this kind of thing makes a ton of sense compared to building up a full-size tower next to your TV, when you can just hide it in the back or hide it in a corner or really hide it wherever you want, because the thing is actually passively cooled and will be completely silent wherever you run it to. The other thing that they can be really great for is as a stream PC. Okay, yes, this is very similar to media PC because it would also be hooked up on your TV, but because of the Intel onboard graphics built in H.264 decoder, if you have a gaming PC somewhere else in your house, you'll be able to decode using Steam in-home streaming and run your games with actually very little latency. Completely separately without building up a separate gaming machine. So they're super cool. They're actually surprisingly affordable and we are giving one away for free. Don't you guys love it when we do giveaways? So check out the link in the video description for a chance to win a D54250WYKH. Man, I wish they just called it like the bear claw or something like that, but then that might make me hungry. Anyway, full of description details in the description. Click there for a chance to win. Thanks for watching guys. Like this video if you liked it, dislike it if you disliked it, leave a comment if your feelings are more complicated than this. As always, check out the link, other link in the description to support us. You can buy a cool t-shirt like this one, give us a monthly contribution to help us keep making videos like this, and change your Amazon bookmark to one with our affiliate code. So whenever you're buying graphics cards, cases, NUCs, whatever the case may be, ha, case again. We get a small kickback. Thanks again for watching and as always, don't forget to subscribe.