I tend to replace my video card every couple years, to keep up with the requirements of the newest games. I always sell my prior hardware on ebay, to offset the cost of the upgrade. It’s always been a smooth process. I’ve mostly stuck with eVGA’s offerings, though recently I jumped from an eVGA 260 GTX to a Galaxy 560 GTX 2GB. I’ve never had any major issues with the hardware I’ve picked, but there has been one to consistently bug me with the last 4 cards I’ve owned: the coolers they come with.

eVGA has a tendency to go with these shuttle coolers that are always noisy, and don’t really have a logical airflow design. I don’t understand why this type of cooler has become so standard. It looks nice, but the air just doesn’t seem to flow. You’ve got a fan with blades that aren’t sloped to push air in a direction, but rather they just sort of shuffle air around inside the shuttle, in hopes that some will push out and some will pull in. You can always try feeling the back of your case where the video card’s exhaust is, and to no one’s surprise, you feel just the faintest amount of heat pushing out, even under full load.

This design is also notorious for collecting dust inside, even to the point where canned air is no match for the kind of clogs that can accumulate inside the labyrinth of heatsink blades. You can try blasting from the front or back, and often the lumps of dust have no means of escape and it requires a full dissemble to clean.

That card, and I assume others, have a stupidly messy paper-mache type of RAM cooling affixed to the chips. Good luck mounting the cooler on more than once without smearing that gunk all over. Finding suitable ram cooling pads online can be a bit of a pain as well. You can opt for the pink silly-putty stuff, which works pretty well and can be reused a couple times.

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