Overclocking, Temperatures and Noise
To test overclocking performance and check if NV40 responds better to core or memory frequency increases, or whether a balanced approach to clocks is best (you can run in to memory bandwidth starvation at some core frequencies, depending on the power of the accelerator), 3DMark03 was chosen.
The 50MHz core increase (12.5%) adds another 400 or so points to the base score while the 9% increase in memory bandwidth offers more conservative performance increases. The maximum stable clock of the sample in 3DMark03 was 460/1250, returning a score just over 13000 3DMark03 marks.
It seems NV40 scales decently with core increases, here's hoping GDD3 frequencies can keep up.
Noise
NVIDIA don't seem to have done much to the reference 5950 Ultra cooler for the NV40 reference cooler (which at least ASUS are adopting). It's quite noisy at full speed, but it does slow down in 2D mode to much more tolerable levels. It sounds, to my deaf old ears, to be ~50dBA from a couple of feet away at ear height in 3D mode.Not the quitest cooler in the world, but I wouldn't go as far as calling it Dustbuster 2.0 either. Annoying at times on my test bed, I'm keen to see what partners do with the cooler.
Temperatures
Here's the GPU temperature as reported by the driver, after some 3DMark03 testing at 420MHz core. Make of it what you will. It was inside a CoolerMaster Wavemaster at the time, to simulate normal usage conditions, instead of it sitting on my test bed.
