OMG! What an up and down day it has been for me!
I got the gfx card today, somehow, with ground shipping that took only one day! (Since it shipped from NJ and Im in NY.)
First impression was that this card is not so big after all; actually its an inch shorter than my x1950pro! It does take up two slots, but barely. One thing which I didnt like was the large amount of white paste between the card and the cooler; looks like MSI applied too much of that? Some of it looks like its caking as well. Dont know, maybe this is normal for these kind of cards? Maybe someone else who has the 8800GTS can let me know about that.
I also see abrasions on the metal plating around the cooler, as if its been scraped along its side; but hopefully this is just a minor cosmetic issue.
I got rid of my IDE hard drive and that prehistoric ribbon cable it uses to get more airflow (just using one SATA 2 drive now), moved my audigy 2 zs card down to the bottom pci slot... and guess what?! I had enough room to squeeze in my dual slot pci cooler between the gfx card and the sound card! It fits in with about half an inch of room to spare!
Ok, now that I got all that out of the way, I boot up my computer and-- uh oh! One of my two dvi lcds isnt working. Not even at POST! I get into XP with a single display and then try to switch ports, but the other monitor doesnt work in the other port and the port which was actually working is sending an "out of range" error to the monitor that wasnt working originally!
Man, now Im really pissed! I switch back the ports so that the one monitor works again, but the other is still showing a blank display. I go into bios and set the pcie settings and come back and... no dice! Im about ready to call newegg to send the card back and then I think-- well lets download the nvidia display drivers... who knows, maybe that will change things.
It did! After I download the latest WHQL drivers, and set up my dual display config, now BOTH monitors work as good as ever! I dont know if it'll become an issue in the future (hopefully not!) but at least for now everything works fine. I just found it strange that one of my displays doesnt get detected (still doesnt in POST) unless and until the nvidia display driver is loaded. Maybe other people with newer nvidia cards and dual displays can chime in here.
I ahd more surprises in store for me when I started BMing. As you know, I run a Q6600 and that gets underclocked on these asrock boards. I can change the bios setting from auto to manual and that takes care of that, but asrock told me that might cause some system stability issues so I put it back on auto. So basically I have a 2.3GHz Q6600 and for some reason I cant fathom my 2GB of DDR2-667 memory is running at 192MHz at a 4:3 ratio to cpu fsb with 3-3-3-9 timings. No time to mess with that right now, I wanted to 3DMark06 this baby!
I found the results absolutely amazing. Not so much the score of 9037 on a pcie 4x board:
Main Test Results3DMark Score 9039 3DMarks
SM 2.0 Score 3715 Marks
SM 3.0 Score 3536 Marks
CPU Score 3562 Marks
Detailed Test Results
Graphics Tests
1 - Return to Proxycon 29.87 FPS
2 - Firefly Forest 32.046 FPS
CPU Tests
CPU1 - Red Valley 1.187 FPS
CPU2 - Red Valley 1.709 FPS
HDR Tests
1 - Canyon Flight (SM 3.0) 36.027 FPS
2 - Deep Freeze (SM 3.0) 34.688 FPS
Anyone else find those close to identical scores very interesting? Maybe Im maxing out the potential of this card with my cpu?
It'd probably be around 9500 or even higher at default Q6600 speeds (I tested default speeds with my 7950GT awhile back and it gave me a 300 pt boost on 3DMark06 and over 3800 points on the CPU part of the test.)
But the big deal... the really big deal here is that the card BARELY even got warm... even though it comes overclocked straight out of the factory-- at 575/1700! I kept atitool and rivatuner running on my other monitor to monitor temps and they started at 50C and didnt even make 60C until I looped 3DMark06 about 5 times! Only then did it reach 61C on the very last test-- Deep Freeze. Ive never ever had a card that didnt warm up to at least 75C, on the first run of 3DMark06, let alone five! I dont know what to make of this. Is the cooler on this card THAT good? Ive never had a dual slot cooler before so I havent a clue if thats what it is. Is it the dual pci cooler sitting under the card thats helping out? Who knows! All I can say is that, after such an up and down few hours, I am very pleasantly surprised with this card! After all the reports of it being a hot card, I anticipated at least 90C but never even got to 60C-- and yes, there was no artifacting whatsoever. I shudder to think how high I can overclock this baby; but with the results I've just obtained...I'm very optimistic.