Cooling the GeForce 8800 GT

NVIDIA's move to a 65nm core - the G92 - has been such a splendid success in its present form at the heart of the GeForce 8800 GT 512MB that the upcoming remake of the GeForce 8800 GTS will also utilize this revised core. So too will the high-end GeForce 8 Mobility GPUs that you'll probably find in gaming notebooks next year. Despite its popularity and impressive performance, we have yet to be convinced by the reference cooler from NVIDIA on the GeForce 8800 GT. While it is quiet and admirably slim, the temperatures on the GeForce 8800 GT have been generally quite high. This has prompted brisk sales for certain third party coolers among enthusiasts though at the same time, raises the ownership costs for a quiet and cool GeForce 8800 GT.

No doubt, the vendors themselves concur, for it wasn't long before they came up with their own custom cooling solutions to tackle this. One of the early results we have seen include the Palit GeForce 8800 GT Sonic, which has done rather well in our temperature tests. Gigabyte is another company with a similar idea and it has turned to Zalman to provide the solution. The end result is the Gigabyte GV-NX88T512HP, equipped with the Zalman VF700-ALCU cooler. Besides that, the card uses a custom blue PCB, is overclocked by default and includes Gigabyte's Turbo Force technology that supposedly enhances stability while overclocked.

Gigabyte has once again bundled Neverwinter Nights 2 along with this Zalman enhanced edition of the GeForce 8800 GT.