Anyway, if someone uses the VF-700Cu on a 7800 GTX, I'd like to know if the fan can be run lower than @12V, and still be effective.
Well, I got home and installed the VF-700cu on my 7800gtx and the results are.. interesting. It's hard to compare apples to apples since the last time I was playing was around 11pm last night. It's ~7pm now, so I assume ambient is a little higher.
Right now it's running directly off a 3-pin mobo header, I'm not sure how much voltage that is. It's not loud per se but very clearly audible, so I assume closer to 12v?
Anyway, the absolute peak is 74c during bf2 gameplay wih the 700cu compared to 77c with the stock cooler. I didn't pay attention to the idle temps, so I can't comment on that. It's at 44c right now while I'm typing this message. I'd estimate once I play later tonight the peak will be a full 5c lower.
However the peak isn't the full story. The temps fluctuate a heck of a lot more while playing with the 700cu. And the temps tends to be lower overall than this peak indicates; even when momentarily staring at the sky while dead, the temps will drop quite a bit. With the stock cooling it hit the peaks and stayed there plus or minus a few degrees. Clearly the 700cu is more efficient than the stock cooler; it bleeds off heat much more rapidly.
It also has a nice area cooling effect on the card. As I've mentioned before, the voltage regulation heatsink at the front of the 7800gtx gets crazy hot, almost too hot to touch, along with a lot of the front side of the stock heatsink. It's noticeably cooler with the 700cu blowing air over it.
So, tentative thumbs up. The stock cooler is fairly quiet for a stock cooler, but it's pretty lame overall for a $600 video card (no copper??).
The stock cooler is actually pretty darn wimpy when disassembled. Very low profile and all aluminum. It takes about 20 screws to remove it, I kept thinking I had removed them all and I'd find another one.
The 7800gtx has a weird 4-pin (!?) fan header on the card. Black, yellow, green, blue in that order. So I can't tell how to match up the 3 pins on the zalman header to the card at all. Ideally I would like the 700cu fan to be voltage/temp controlled somehow, rather than running at a constant speed off a mobo header.. ideas?