Cooling System

Nvidia equipped the GeForce 8800 GTX with a highly efficient cooling system, quiet and capable of dissipating over 130 watts of heat. We gave you a detailed description of the cooler in our theoretical review of the GeForce 8800 architecture.

The developer took steps to decrease power consumption of the GeForce 8800 Ultra, so the card might have been equipped with the same cooler, but Nvidia decided different and modified it to some extent.

The main difference is that the fan is positioned outside the PCB, perhaps for the purpose of taking air in more efficiently. The fan can now take air not only from below, but also from above through the hole in the cooler’s base. The casing is now as long as the card itself, although there are no additional air-ducts inside it and the whole stream of air is still directed to blow at the heatsink. The rear-part elements do not actually need any cooling, but the new casing covers them, too. Considering the length of the card, you may have problems installing your GeForce 8800 Ultra on certain mainboards. For example, it may block the mainboard’s Serial ATA ports or press against some mainboard elements with its casing.

Otherwise, the cooler’s design has remained unchanged. Its copper sole contacting with the GPU die transfers heat to the aluminum heatsink via heat pipes, and a fan is set to blow at the heatsink. There are two heat pipes here: a flat U-shaped one is pressed into the cooler’s base while another, round, pipe carries the heat over to the remote part of the heatsink. The heatsink has remained almost the same size as on the GeForce 8800 GTX.

Hot air is exhausted outside the system case through the slits in the card’s mounting bracket. Other hot components, like the NVIO processor, memory chips and power circuit elements, give their heat to the aluminum frame the rest of the cooling system is mounted on. The frame has juts opposite the components it is supposed to cool. A proper thermal contact is ensured by means of non-organic fiber pads soaked in white thermal grease.

A 5.8W Delta BFB1012L blower on ball bearings is used here, the same fan as in the GeForce 8800 GTX cooler. It uses a 4-pin connection and can be controlled using pulse-width modulation. Having dealt with a lot of GeForce 8800 cards, we are sure the noise parameters of the GeForce 8800 Ultra cooler are going to be within reasonable limits since it has inherited all the features of the GeForce 8800 GTX cooler, which is surely the best of modern stock graphics card cooling systems.