Noise & Cooling

The cooler on the 8800GTX is fairly quiet and will run at very low RPMs until the temperature of the card shoots up at which point the fan speed does increase slightly. However, unless you are turning the speed above 80% then you are not really going to notice it over the usual levels of noise that come with an average PC.

The cooler itself does a reasonable job of keeping temperatures in check, but if you are overclocking you are going to want to increase the RPM manually as the 8800 tends to stay at around 70 under load unless you reall crank up those fan revs. The best performance vs noise speed setting is at about 80% as this keeps the noise relatively low while giving you some nice temperature figures too.

Cost

As per other 8800 cards the Foxconn 8800GTX is going to set you back a pretty penny. However, since the OC and XXX versions have been released prices of the "Basic" 8800 cards like this one have fallen slightly. Still though you are looking at spening around the £400 mark for this card so it is definately up there with the more expensive PC components.

DX10 Support

The 8800 is the first card to support Microsoft's new DirectX 10 standard. However, unless you are really desperate to be the first person you know to have Vista running with the new Aero theme showing its full glory, there is little else that can be gained from this feature at this point. There are a few games that currently support DX10, Company of Heroes being perhaps the most popular. However, if you are buying this card simply for its DX10 features, you would be well advised to take a serious look at whether this is the right time to do so as currently DX10 games are performing rather poorly in Vista due to shoddy drivers and slow technology uptake. Later this year many more games will be released which support this feature, and Vista's larger holes should have been fixed by then so it may be better to hold off buying this card until then.

Gamepad Testing

For those who really liked the sound of the included gamepad, I powered up an old N64 ROM I downloaded (If you do this you can only legally keep it on your PC for 24 hours) and gave it a test run. The game I chose to test the gamepad on was Mario Kart 64, an old favourite of mine.

The controller features a myriad of controls for you to use. A Dpad, two analogue thumbsticks, two central buttons, 4 shoulder buttons and four buttons on the right setup in the typical playstation controller style. To test the game, I setup the top shoulder buttons as L and R, the central right button as Start, I used the left analogue stick for the old N64 analogue stick and the right hand buttons for A and B.

This system worked perfectly and the game was a lot more fun using this than using a standard keyboard. However, while playing I couldn't quite get my hands comfortable. This is due to the fact that it always feels like your 2nd and third fingers should be resting near the back, when its impossible to hold that way. Its hard to explain but its just not quite right. Despite this, the pad was a welcome addition to the bundle and made having a blast through some old games that much more fun.