Best GPU Cooler Type

i have the MSI Hawk (aka twin frozr) cooler on my GTS 250
I have the cyclone cooler on my GTX 460

of the two I find the cyclone runs cooler and with less noise but both are very good to excellent coolers.

The Gigabyte is what I have and it is a reliable card. The core doesn't get hot unlike Palit (crap) and has VRM cooling (rare only Zotak besides Gigabyte has that). The noise is next to nothing and is much more quiet than my case fans. None however has vram cooling. AVOID Palit no matter what they are the worst GTX 460 on the market and they have a lot of problems. on Newegg on wrote that some of the fins on the fan broke and most complained about not having any cooling on the vrm.

The Hawk and Cyclone has no VRM cooling either and only have good core cooling however watch your volts as I have found a Hawk that failed when the owner pushed it over 1ghz core at 1.28v. The card died... If you get the Cyclone get some Zalman ramsinks to cool the VRM and every GTX 460 needs cooling back there due to their designs. I am not sure how hot the GTS 450 runs though back there but it can't be all that great either.

Thank you all for your quick responses. I really appreciate the feed back. Have any of you have had any experience with the standard reference typed coolers?

I am in the process of deciding between the EVGA GTX 460 (w/ full card cooler), and the MSI Cyclone

The full cover isn't all that much different and the cooler is crap. Same crappy compound and the vrm and vram is worse off than the Cyclone. I wonder why only the two choices when there are more out there?

Do you have any other suggestions for the coolers? I prefer not to remove the stock heatsink coolers because I do not trust myself in modding the GPU, and I rather just buy one already with a good cooler

The Gigabyte is a easy card to work with and is better cooled plus it is low risk over time even with overclocking as it has a heatsink for the VRM. The next in line but very risky if heavy overclocking is the msi hawk. The absolute worst card out there is Palit.

So, should I go with the Gigabyte dual-fan gpu, the EVGA stock cooling, or the MSI Cyclone?

if you're picking evga, i hope you skip the 460 that says "external exhaust".

i saw 2 folks here having some temp problems with that card.

The Gigabyte dual fan is one of the best ones to buy and they are popular on Newegg as well outside the US. The temp that I get are below 60c at max and it is silent.