Noise, Temperature, Overclockability, Compatibility

The same cooler installed on the Gainward Bliss 9600 GT 512MB GS had very good results in our tests, delivering high cooling performance at little noise. We checked it out again to see if its settings are any different on the Bliss 8800 GTS 1024MB.

The level of ambient noise in our lab was 36dBA and the level of noise at a distance of 1 meter from the working testbed with a passively cooled graphics card inside was 43dBA. Here are the results:

The cooler of the Gainward Bliss 8800 GTS 1024MB is acoustically comfortable. The card is inaudible just like the Bliss 9600 GT 512MB GS. The CPU temperature is higher, though: 55°C in idle mode and 70°C under load. Considering the increased GPU frequencies, that’s an excellent result that confirms the high efficiency of the cooler.

We were not successful at overclocking. We managed to increase the memory frequency to 1180 (2360) MHz, i.e. almost to the rated one, but the core wouldn’t speed up above 740MHz. We decided not to benchmark the card at the overclocked frequencies.

Like every other Gainward card we’ve reviewed earlier, this one was perfectly compatible with every PCI Express 1.0a mainboard we tried it with.