Since the topic of 'Which 8800GT is right for me?' comes up a lot I'm going to document my experience with my 'passively cooled' 8800GT from ECS. I bought the card for $206 shipped AR.
First, the packaging. It's nothing special and the gorillas at UPS have a non-zero chance to destroy your card. I'm not the only one who got the card with the Accelero brackets having come loose during shipping. Fortunately the heatsink did not separate from the GPU and I was able to sweat the brackets back into place. If it does separate you'll see temperatures like 80C idle and 120 load! Definitely not a good way to go.
First pass: throw the card into the case, fire it up. No problems -- came up, got video, booted Linux. Unfortunately Ubuntu 7.10 didn't have drivers for the 8 series cards, so I go to sweat it w/o thermal monitoring while downloading and compiling the 169 series drivers.
Sitting idle for ~10 minutes with no active cooling (but with case cover off, case on its side) had the card heat up to mid to upper 50s. I decided not to do a rigorous load test. Heat sink felt hot (but not blisteringly so) to the touch.
Turbo modules installed, case cover still off, let's try this bad boy again. BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE... etc. Leap for the power switch, empty trousers of feces, troubleshoot. Whew, I forgot to reattach the PCIe connector. Let's try that again, minus the heart attack.
Idle core temperature 30C. 30C. 30C. 30C. That can't be right. Touch the heatsink, it's ice cold. Break out the baby thermometer.... 27C on the heatsink. Ok, mmmmaybe.
Core is running at 650, memory at 1900, shaders at 1625. So much for the famed power miser auto-downclock. At least on Linux.
Time to fire up a game. 30 minutes of counterstrike later, ambient 34C GPU at 43. No problem, let's fire up 2 instances of Eve Online. Still 34/43.
Closed up the case, placed it right side up, repeat. Now I'm looking at about 3C higher across the board. At this point it's late, and I decided to work with case airflow and atitool load testing later.
Preliminary impressions: OMGWTFawesome.
First, the packaging. It's nothing special and the gorillas at UPS have a non-zero chance to destroy your card. I'm not the only one who got the card with the Accelero brackets having come loose during shipping. Fortunately the heatsink did not separate from the GPU and I was able to sweat the brackets back into place. If it does separate you'll see temperatures like 80C idle and 120 load! Definitely not a good way to go.
First pass: throw the card into the case, fire it up. No problems -- came up, got video, booted Linux. Unfortunately Ubuntu 7.10 didn't have drivers for the 8 series cards, so I go to sweat it w/o thermal monitoring while downloading and compiling the 169 series drivers.
Sitting idle for ~10 minutes with no active cooling (but with case cover off, case on its side) had the card heat up to mid to upper 50s. I decided not to do a rigorous load test. Heat sink felt hot (but not blisteringly so) to the touch.
Turbo modules installed, case cover still off, let's try this bad boy again. BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE... etc. Leap for the power switch, empty trousers of feces, troubleshoot. Whew, I forgot to reattach the PCIe connector. Let's try that again, minus the heart attack.
Idle core temperature 30C. 30C. 30C. 30C. That can't be right. Touch the heatsink, it's ice cold. Break out the baby thermometer.... 27C on the heatsink. Ok, mmmmaybe.
Core is running at 650, memory at 1900, shaders at 1625. So much for the famed power miser auto-downclock. At least on Linux.
Time to fire up a game. 30 minutes of counterstrike later, ambient 34C GPU at 43. No problem, let's fire up 2 instances of Eve Online. Still 34/43.
Closed up the case, placed it right side up, repeat. Now I'm looking at about 3C higher across the board. At this point it's late, and I decided to work with case airflow and atitool load testing later.
Preliminary impressions: OMGWTFawesome.
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