Got it completed. The case is brilliant- the fans are very quiet, especially compared to the dull roar of my old ones, and keep the GPU cool easily. It was
55 degrees Celsius after playing Mass Effect with all settings near-maxed on 1280x1024 for 45 minutes.
The GTX 280 was running Mass Effect with all settings near-maxed on 1280x1024, and the only issues I saw were occasional graphical artifacting, which I credit
to the newness of the drivers, and the occasional (once every minute or so) hitch in framerate. Both will be fixed with a driver update (the current version
is slightly past mine, but I'm waiting for the one after that).
Unreal Tournament 3 is even better looking, and ran smoother to boot on maxed settings. I'm fairly sure that the artifacts I was seeing in Mass Effect
were driver/game incompatibility, because this one looks good.
I played Crysis for an hour on Medium settings (High textures/models, 2x AA added) without a hitch. It looks beautiful, and plays just as well. I'm
fairly sure I could crank a few more settings to high as well, and will experiment on my next session. The GTX 280 is well cooled- it was 66 degrees C by the
end, and cooled down to 49 within two minutes of leaving the game. My 6600 GTs idled around 60 and generally played games in the 70s, so this is very good
news. In game, the card started emitting a high-pitched whining noise, presumably from its fan going at high speed. This was fairly easily noticeable over my
case fans, but far quieter than my old fans at normal speed.
Assassin's Creed also got an hour of play, and kept to the same standards of everything else. I played it on near-maxed settings with no problems for
about an hour, but then got some intermittent minor artifacting in the upper-left corner of my view. Quitting allowed me to check my temp, which was the same
66 degrees that Crysis generated. Odd. The game plays quite well for a port of a console game, especially if you have a 5-button mouse. After about 20
minutes, the controls just click, and everything makes sense- mind you, I was happy for the tutorial during those 20 minutes... which is just about the length
of the introduction/tutorial.
I'll update soon with impressions on World In Conflict, Oblivion, and HL2. This is my weekend, so I have plenty of time to mess with this.
My
Unitarian Jihad Name is:
Brother Atom Bomb of Courteous Debate.
Get yours.
I've been writing a bit.
