Instead, we have a large gold-tone heatsink with a fan sitting squarely in the middle. I looked at it from the side and noticed that there is heatsink grease coming out from under the heatsink. Way to go Leadtek. I don't know how many times I've pried the heatsinks off of videocards in order to put better aftermarket units in with heatsink grease. I'd say yes.
Heat is the leading cause of instability.
I've seen some cards produce less visual artifacts once their cooling package was revised. I reviewed the Matrox Millenium G450 recently and it required a special dongle cable that plugged into its second output to enable S-Video output. This isn't a major issue since Matrox included the correct cable but it just shows to me that nVidia designed the MX to be less reliant on special dongle cables. All rights reserved.