Noise and Overclocking
Depending on whether any of the board partners NVIDIA has for NV38 and NV36 pick up the reference cooler designs, some of this commentary could be pretty useless. With Tech Report's eVGA FX 5700 Ultra test board being identical to my reference board design, 5700 Ultra's from partners may use the cooler you see in my shots.
The dual slot cooler on 5950 Ultra uses a Delta BFB0712H DC brushless blower, rated to 38dBA at full speed and 12V. I'll believe that, with the cooler running nice and quiet in 2D mode (300MHz core, down from 475MHz) and just above what I'm used to with my ASUS 5900 Ultra in 3D mode. Certainly not ear splitting, certainly not silent.
The 5700 Ultra cooler was a little less intrusive in terms of overall fan noise, but didn't appear to slow down much at all in 2D mode. Both were pretty quiet, what more can I say?
Overclocking
I planned an entire section on overclocking, but traditionally reference boards tend to go a little higher than retail samples, since GPU makers want their cards to look nice in reviews, so I'm holding off until we get proper retail versions of boards.The FX5600 Ultra would do these speeds for most benchmarks and games, completely stable, but take the clocks with a pinch of salt.
I have high hopes for IBM's 130nm process when applied to NV36, but we need retail samples first.
5950 Ultra topped out at around 595/1100 for most things, but again the same caveat applies.
