My eVGA GeForce 6800 arrive today along with the NV Silencer. First I have to say that the NV Silencer is INCREDIBLY quiet. WOW! I actually think my 6800 is quieter than my Ti-4600 was. I'm amazed. I'm also happy to see how cool the card is staying. When looking in the driver properties, the 'Ambient' Temperature typically reads about 35C at idle while the Core reads 56C. After a few bouts of 3DMark05, the Core reads 63C and the Ambient bumps up to 41C.
Now I have no idea what the ambient temperature is supposed to represent, but I'm happy to see the card's core temperature remain cool under heavy workload. I'll soon be giving it a run through with Half-Life 2 to see how hot it actually gets. I just wish I could get SpeedFan to read the GPU temperature.
I also tried to unlock the pipelines and vertex shaders and came up a bit short. As soon as I rebooted after unlocking the exra pipelines, everything was grainy and there were random pixels that were changing colors. Obviously the disabled pipelines don't work. The vertex shader, on the other hand, appears to be working just fine. I need to run some more tests, but I haven't seen any artifacts or 'oddities' with it yet. This weekend I'll truly get to give it a test as I attempt to overclock as well. (BTW, my 3DMark05 score was only 3300 with this card. Probably because I'm stuck at AGP 4x with my Intel 845d chipset).