 For this video I will be testing the temperatures and acoustics of the GTX 550 Ti. I'll be testing the Cyclone 2 edition of the card against the reference NVIDIA designed edition of the card. So the first one I have here on the bench is the reference card. So our maximum temperature, ignore this, is actually 75 degrees and it looks like it takes us about 1950 RPM or about 49% fan speed in order to achieve that temperature. So I'm going to get close and I'll let you guys have a listen. And then I'm going to switch to the Cyclone 2 and see how much MSI's cooler improves the thermals and noise characteristics of this video card. Well it looks like this is where we settle for the Cyclone 2 cooler. The max temperature is around 63 degrees so that makes it a good 10 plus degrees cooler than the reference design. However, it is louder at these settings than the reference cooler was. So we're actually at a fan speed of about 71%, well about 70%, exactly 71% and that is a fan RPM of around 3000 RPM. So to give us that GPU temperature we are paying a bit of a price in terms of noise. So what MSI has done is they have actually set a more aggressive fan profile than Nvidia had set on their reference card through the BIOS. Now one of the other things to note about these two cards is that besides the GPU temperatures, you can see right here the MOSFETs do not have any additional cooling on them. Right in there. Whereas on the MSI card there's actually a metal heatsink covering the VRMs. Now that is very hot to the touch and I gotta say I would be more comfortable with a card that has even passive cooling on the VRMs and then incidental airflow as well versus one that is only counting on incidental airflow from the fan to cool the VRMs. Now one thing I'm gonna do before we finish this up and this is kind of a new thing is I'm going to tweak the fan on the Cyclone 2 to be around the same RPM as the stock fan and see what kind of temperatures we get with a similar speed, similar fan speed and similar noise profile. So I actually got a far more desirable result than I had expected. If we relax our GPU fan just by manually setting the speed, so I've set it to 45% and that is around 1500 RPM, we get 75 degree load temperatures in Furmark and I mean... So I'm turning off the CPU fan here. That gives us an almost silent experience compared to the reference cooler at the same temperature. So the Cyclone 2 definitely does a better job than the reference cooler whether we're looking at silent performance or whether we're looking at sheer performance when you go to the max to see what it can do. So why don't we just see how loud it is at maximum volume just for fun and thank you for checking out Linus Tech Tips. Don't forget to subscribe.