you need your hearing checked if you think that's silent. :( The articles is good info to know generally speaking though.

Just though comment on the no overclockability.. what about watercooling ?

Would be interessting to see the card hooked up to a Swiftech MCW55™ VGA waterblock.
[url]http://www.swiftnets.com/products/mcw55.asp[/url]

Ii was surprised to find the OpenGL testing results. the new hotfix released by ATi for their Xik family seems to have majorperformance gains in doom3/quake4, as detailed in this article
http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/quake_4_high-end_performance/default.asp
were the x1800__ cards not tested with these newer drivers???

The review was excellent.However, Leadtek WinFast PX7800 GTX reached 538 mhz gpu core.
http://www.amdzone.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=Sections&file=inde x&req=viewarticle&artid=184&page=1
Why the X1800 overclocking capability wasn't questioned in the article?Maybe cuz its pre-overclocked.

I know you spent a lot of time on this. I think the updated drivers help the 7800 series and would have been useful. ATI also could have made use of the Opengl updates. However, this amount of detail takes time so I'm grateful for the work.

I tend to like Leadtek's design a bit better, partially because it makes it very easy to add a larger fan for slightly better temp. But the Leadtek doesn't look like it needs it. As the poster above noted, the Leadtek can score in excess of 530mhz so not getting the Asus card higher is quite sad. Both the XFX and the EVGA solutions top 500 easily and in some cases 515-520 is not out of reach.

The leadtek looks like the best design so far, but there remains some questions as to what the solution will be when the 512mb cards arrive. Leadtek can probably just add a heatpipe or two that feeds over to the front heatsink array but the other designs are going to have issues if there are high heat memory on the back of the card. I do realize memory doesn't usually generate great amounts of heat, but these cards do seem to change that thinking.

Again, kudos for the detail of this article.

:)

You got to be kidding me, stating that an overclocked graphics card is better than another at default! :|

You need to overclock the nvidia card just to match the ATI card.

LOL, i guess this is just marketing at work...