Gigabyte 6800GT (GV-N68T256DH) fan on top & heatpipe

[Chudilo]

I just Got one of these card and bellow are my first impressions.

This is still a reference design card however as you can see from the pics Bellow the amount of thought and Technology that went into the Heatsink design is extensive. The first thing I noticed is that it is so far the only card with the Fan on top, which in my opinion has to make a world of difference. Heat rises, therefore, to me, having a fan on the bottom of the card blowing heat downward makes no sense whatsoever because the heat comes right back up. I have 2 slow & quiet LED fans taking heat away from CPU in the back of the case. They seem to be doing a wonderful job. I have learned that Heat pipes really do work very effectively transferring heat away from CPUs. Look at the ThermalRight SP-94 and XP-90 (two of best coolers on the market). I got the XP 90 to go with the card
Thus, the top plate with a fan should provide plenty of heat dissipation for the GPU. Worst case scenario, if I decide to do some serious overclocking I may choose to add a second low profile fan can be added on the bottom of the card.

Does anyone have anything to say about this card? Has anyone seen or done any reviews on it? I will post my findings as soon as I get it.

I have found 1 thread where someone was tinkering around to fit the card into a tight shuttle case, there is no useful info there on cards performance however the person did provide some excellent pictures of the card.
Link to pictures

And here is link to the manual on the Gigabyte Site
Link to a PDF of the manual

 

[Chudilo]

Page 16 of the manual has a custom performance enhancement utility called V-tuner 2.
It seems really cool Aparently this card has Hardware monitoring of the GPU/Memory temperature and allows for adjustment of the Fan/GPU/memory speeds ..
are there advantages to using this utility rather then the original thingie that's built into the driver?

Has anyone seen this utility yet?

 

[Pete]

Someone's got one and has posted pics at the Sudhian forums. I think I found that thread by Googling.

Yeah, it looks promising. What's even cooler is that GB sells a fanless version of the same cooler on their 6800. A silent 6800 is pretty sweet, considering its performance.

 

[Chudilo]

That is the forum where I got the pictures for the card from.
Here is a link to the forum he's talking about.

However I don't know how usefull that thread is by Anand's forum standards that's why I started a separate thread here. It has no useful info on the card's performance or heat charachteristics.
I have a good friend working for Dev-hardware. I might be considering hooking up with him to use my card for a full-blown review. I am a long time Hardware professional with lots of hardware experience and theoretical training. I might actually consider doing a review on it either myself (if I am propositioned) or co-authoring a review for Dev-hardware.

 

[Chudilo]

The card was just delivered! It looks awesome. The heatsink is pretty heavy. Fan looks a bit on the small side. I will be installing it tonight.

A Copy of Doom3 is in the box also.

I also got an XP-90 to go with this to finially finish my setup I 'll have a heatpipe Heatsink on CPU and Video. will post my findings on everything as soon as I get it all installed tonight.

 

[drpootums]

ah, i've been looking into a 6800 GT, and this seems to be cheaper than most. So, there is a heatsink on the bottom and a HS/F on top? Sweet...please report ur temps and maybe some oc's

 

[Demo24]

ever think of why the fan is always on the bottom? maybe its because the memory and GPU are there and therefore having a fan there allows cool air to flow directly over it to cool it down efficently and quickly. I would wonder about this card as heat has to go to the rear of the card to get cooled down to acceptabel levels.

 

[MoogerFooger]

Originally posted by: Pete
Someone's got one and has posted pics at the Sudhian forums. I think I found that thread by Googling.

Yeah, it looks promising. What's even cooler is that GB sells a fanless version of the same cooler on their 6800. A silent 6800 is pretty sweet, considering its performance.

So, hopefully the heatsink is quite effective on its own...



I have a Gigabyte 9700 Pro. The fan died so I had to do smth about cooling, so I installed Zalman heatsink with heat pipes which can actually cool it without any fan, but I opted for a fan anyway. This heatsink on 6800GT looks as massive as Zalman's if not even more so. I guess that neither a small top fan nor its position is a problem. Zalman's fan is installed on the side of the card and makes almost no contact with the sink.

 

[kki000]

cooltech review 6800nu

well heres a writeup on the 6800nu.. looks like a similar cooler.

I always though that the cooler should be on that side, it is "up" for most ppl with twr cases after all.
K

 

[MoogerFooger]

Well, it looks like the 6800GT would be just as good for OC.

 

[Chudilo]

ok Idle GPU temp without touchin gany settings is 56C or 132 F at fan speed 3168rpm(inaudible from outside of case)

 

[MoogerFooger]

Okay... So is it a good thing? I'm a n00b at these temperatures and fan speeds.

 

[MoogerFooger]

Any updates, Michael?

 

[Chudilo]

Heat sink works great, I was running the Nvidia demos. GPU never goes too far up from that idle temp. Too bad there is no GPU utilization bar like there is for CPU Somehow I don't think that the GPU is fully used. I don't think the heatsink could be That effective. So far everything is 100 % stable. I ran Doom 3, it is unplayable with Antialiacing on. I will report frame rates without antialiacing later. I played Doom without antialiacing for a bit. I heard the fan speed up ... it became audible but not to the point of being annoying liek on the BFG Ultra. I was also playing Guild Wars over the weekend for a couple of hours at a time. I'm not crazy about the game but the visuals looked stunning with Antialiacing enabled, stuff starts looking like video at resolutions of 1024x786 and above. well I don't know abotu video .. it kinda has an organic feel to it .. maybe because colors gets equalized.. ex.: two bright colors next to each other have an effect on each other .. so it seems more natrual. in addition, jaggies are gone.

Video processor is not working just like on the rest of the 6800s. I was playing the Step into Liquid HD demo CPU utilization is still around 60-80% on my 3.0 p4 with hyperthreading. (as ooposed to the the promissed 8-15% where it should be with a working video processor)

I do not plan to overclock this card any time soon . I had a PNY 4400 which died and got exchanged for a 5600 which died then got exchanged twice but still refused to work in my new motherboard (Asus a4c800 Deluxe). finally ended up exchanging two dead PNY cards for 2 new ones, which I dsold on ebay and that is how I was able to justify spending all the doe on this card .

 

[MoogerFooger]

Thanks for the update. That was a nice read. One thing I don't understand is the video processor and why it isn't working.
Am I missing some info on 6800s?

 

[Chudilo]

Yes. If you look at the Official Video Processor Thread, they talk about the Hardware video decoding that was a promissed feature on the 6800s (it's printed on many retail boxes and is mentioned in manualls). as of right now only the 6600s support it right out of the box. Meaning when you play an extreme resolution video, such as the full 1080p Step Into Liquid video, you should not be seeing CPU utilization go up , GPU is supposed to be doing all the decoding.

But so far everyone is reporting 80-100% when playing that particular video .. (it's the highest resolution they could find to be publically available)

 

[Chudilo]

Yesterday I got the 3d mark to benchmark the card. However I will not post an official score because I was only testing the temperatures for now. (I was downloading the World of warcraft open beta in the background). After running the test with sound enabled...the temperature of the card only went up by 10 degrees Celcius. Meaning after the benchmark exited the V-tuner utility was showing 64 degrees Celcius. and the fan rotating at about 3260 Meaning still not audible over three other case fans that I have in my case (32db or bellow, each)
Once again this is without any sort of overclocking. I set fan speed to be auto-adjusted by the card(it's one of the options in the vTuner utility)

 

[MoogerFooger]

Nice one. I guess I will buy this card eventually to couple with my Gigabyte KNXP mobo.

 

[Chudilo]

Reinstalled Windows to enable HyperThreading yesterday on top of my old installation. After installing all applicable drivers it was taking forever for th PC to get into windows. After I reinstalled SP2 problem went away. but i noticed the System trojan horse in my task manager (came out of no-where) thank god for Google found a way to remove it.. BTW I recomend all to go through your task list and google every single one of the processes periodically. a whole bunch of stuff loads in ther efr no eason .. stuff like quicktime and MSN messenger.. and itunes and so on ... if you don't need to always have it n there it shouldn't be there.

Anyway now with full hyperthreading enabled (2 CPU graphs in task manager I will probably be running the real benchmarks tonight, in regular and "turbo" mode, that's what Gigabyte called it in their tuner utility... I'm guessing since the card is geared toward gamers .... they assume you'll be overclocking it one way or another .. so they might as well provide proper means for it so that you don't shoot yourself in the foot.

 

[slash196]

Yeah, having the fan DOWN never made sense to me...but if you put an exhaust in the side it shouldn't matter anyway.

 

[MoogerFooger]

I guess in some five years all PCs would probably be fanless.

 

[Chudilo]

Apparently the organic feel of lighting in Guild wars is one of the better features or Guild wars.. it wasn't the antialiasing that made it look so nice.. It the game engine. Kudos to the developers.

I tried playing World of Warcraft yesterday (open beta/stress test) interface is a little better. but I hate the way the world looks.. "Guild wars" looks Waaaaaay better.

 

[Chudilo]

Wouldn't the side exhaust have to be under the card rather then by CPU, which is where most of them are.

 

[Chudilo]

Just played Far cry for a while GPU temp only went up 10 degrees to 63 and the fan sped up to 3260 rpm
And this is with HDR enabled. Apparently i didn't know that you could disable it. (There were some noticable dropped frames) and I was getting upset at bellow top noth performance from a high performace board.

 

[Chudilo]

I found this greate Temperature stress test and was finally able to test out how efficient this Heatpipe setup actually is.

With GPU Core clocked at 400mhz, topped out at 93 degrees with fan at full blast of 3500rpm.
However everything was completely stable and running just fine.

Stock Clock speed (350Mhz)made it run at about 85 degrees.

I have not seen temperatures anywhere near 90s in real life applications.
Doom III and Far cry only make the board go up to 63-65 degrees or low 70s for 400Mhz.

Also I have a small side fan for an intake and 2 rears + 2 PSU fans for exhaust. I've been meaning to install a Panaflow (That has been laying around) for the longest time as an aditional intake. Will report if that makes a noticable difference.