I am not going to talk about game frame rate. There are plenty of benchmarking sites that you should be using instead. I'm just going to cover the product. The PCB and plastic fan shroud are all black and in general look good. The heatsink doesn't contact the VRAM modules nor the VRMs. They are left to be actively cooled by air from the fan. It doesn't seem to pose any issue for the card for these components being cooled this way. If you were insistent, half the VRAM modules could be cooled via some thick thermal pads (maybe 3mm?) to bridge the gap between VRAM and heatsink. The other VRAM modules sit under a much larger gap. You wouldn't be able to bridge it with thermal pads. Just to reiterate though, this isn't needed for the product to function as sold.
The GPU was used in a Cooler Master Elite 130 case at about 5 feet away, your mileage on temps and noise may differ. The fan itself isn't quiet but it isn't the loudest I've heard. Under 100% you can hear it easily in a quiet environment. If you're using speakers and have the volume decently turned up, game effects will mask most of the noise. For over the ear headphone users the noise is much less noticeable. My unit had no accompanying coil whine at stock nor overclocked. All in all I would rate it fair for the noise level considering it is a single fan solution.
I loaded up unigine heaven to get a baseline temp and performance reading before starting to overclock. I found at stock the card will sit at roughly 76c. I pushed the power limit to 110%, core clock to 1.21GHz, and memory clock to 7000Mhz using AMD's Overdrive included in the software. I could probably push these numbers further but I wasn't particularly in the mood to dial in exactly the MHz between 7000 and 7200mhz that was stable. This resulted in the max temp reaching 79-80c and the accompanying noise to just hit the point I wasn't comfortable with. I unscrewed the heatsink via the four Philip head screws on the bottom and swapped out the thermal paste with some Antec Formula 7. This dropped my unigine heaven temps down to 72-73c while overclocked.
What I will mention about gaming performance is the sweet spot I found between resolution, frame rate, and graphical settings was often 900p at 60 fps. This allowed you to keep most things pretty while maintaining a high frame rate. My main PC is a full tower ATX form factor with a GTX 970 and I specifically built a little ITX build using this card for LAN style parties at friend's. Overall I'm happy with the little LAN box. Money spent vs what MSI delivered, I'm satisfied. I docked one star because while the fan noise isn't the worst it isn't great either.
| Memory Speed | 600 MHz |
|---|---|
| Graphics Coprocessor | AMD Radeon R7 240 |
| Chipset Brand | AMD |
| Graphics Card Ram Size | 2 GB |
