MSI N9600GT Hybrid Freezer

The MSI N9600GT Hybrid Freezer

The MSI N9600GT Hybrid Freezer

At first glance, the MSI N9600GT Hybrid Freezer doesn't seem too different from the many heatpipe based coolers that we have seen over the years. With a fan nestled in the center and surrounded by fins and heat pipes, it may seem like a rather conventional design. But here's the twist: the fan did not turn when we plugged the card in.

In case you think that the fan is faulty for not spinning up, it's actually working as intended. MSI is relying on passive cooling from the heatsink for this GeForce 9600 GT, with the fan starting up only at high temperatures during intensive usage. According to MSI, the trigger point occurs when the core temperature goes above 80 degrees Celsius. When we tested this card, the fan never started spinning, as the temperatures we recorded on the MSI did not hit the threshold. Personally, we would have preferred a lower threshold as 80 degrees sounds much too warm but it's up to MSI to decide this. So far, there's no indication that users can set their own triggers for the fan.

Obviously, the purpose of not turning on the fan is to keep this card completely silent, with the fan acting as a form of backup in case the temperatures reach dangerous levels. MSI's website lists the fan at 28 decibels when it does run, which is decently quiet. Since the fins are encased in a plastic shroud, with a possibly negative impact on heat dissipation, MSI has thickened the diameter of the heat pipes from the typical 5mm to 6mm in order to improve heat conduction (especially since the fan trigger point is set very high).

Finally, MSI has also bumped up the clock speeds on this card, though only slightly compared to some of its competitors. The core has been increased to 700MHz from 650MHz, with a corresponding increase of stream processor clock to 1680MHz. Meanwhile the 1GB of GDDR3 memory is at the standard 1800MHz, which is the specified speed for the 1.1ns memory chips found on this board.

Besides the Hybrid Freezer cooler and the clock speed information, this is your standard GeForce 9600 GT, so you can expect all the features on this mid-range graphics card. You can read more about it in our previous article on this NVIDIA SKU.

The MSI package came with a rather comprehensive list of items, though no games or applications were included:

• DVI-to-VGA adapter
• DVI-to-HDMI adapter
• 9-pin mini-DIN to Component/S-Video dongle
• 6-pin Molex power connector
• S-Video extension cable
• S/PDIF cable
• Quick user's guide
• Quick installation guide
• MSI Multimedia CD (Drivers & Utilities)

Test Setup

The MSI N9600GT Hybrid Freezer is but the latest GeForce 9600 GT that we have reviewed over the past few months and for all of these, we have kept to the same test bed and benchmarks. This consisted of an Intel D975XBX 'Bad Axe' motherboard installed with an Intel Core 2 Duo E6700 (2.66GHz) processor. We also used 2GB of DDR2-800 low latency memory modules from Kingston, configured in dual channel mode and a Seagate 7200.7 SATA hard drive, on which we had installed Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2 and DirectX 9.0c.

Taking from our previous reviews of various GeForce 9600 GT cards, with varying clock speeds and designs, we have compiled their results and will be comparing the MSI N9600GT Hybrid Freezer against selected models. All these cards were tested with ForceWare 174.12 drivers and our benchmark results were taken using the included time demos and other built-in benchmarking tools available in the following games:

• Futuremark 3DMark06 (ver 110)
• Company of Heroes (ver 1.3)
• F.E.A.R (ver 1.0)
• World in Conflict (ver 1.05)
• Supreme Commander (patched to 3255)
• Crysis (ver 1.1)
• Unreal Tournament 3 (ver 1.1)