I'm not sure whether it's been posted here yet, but since I just found out too late today, I wanted to make sure it was.
Here's the deal.
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Sapp ... ic/25.html
I had personally planned to keep the stock cooler on it for the first 6 months or so, just in case of failure. But, I guess right now I have to either take my chances and get an aftermarket cooler, or stick with the noise for a while (it really is by far the noisiest part in my system, sounds a bit like a CD-drive at 30x or so)Sapphire has chosen to remove the temperature based fan control mechanism from their cooling solution. The fan will always run at the same speed, no matter if you run an idle system in Antarctica or under full load in the middle of the Saudi Desert. When asked, Sapphire replied that they "noticed that on many systems the problem is that the fan always starts and stops - at different temperatures. So we decided to always run at the same quiet fan speed".
This approach results in one of the noisiest cards under idle. When compared to the reference design HD 4850 the fan is 16.4 dbA noisier in idle - that's over 40x the sound pressure. Under load the margin gets smaller, yet the card cannot compare to the reference design when it comes to fan noise. However, the increased fan speed results in much lower temperatures and higher overclocking potential. Unfortunately power users won't be able to adjust the fan via any software. No matter what fan speed the card wants to run at the fan will always be around 1700 RPM.
Other than the noise, I wouldn't worry about temperatures, I haven't put it through any really severe testing, but it barely came above 50C in a quick game of CoD4 on high at 1280*1024.
It's a great card, it really is, I just don't understand why they messed with the fan control...