Well, i got the new card and it was a major hassle to build it in. I have a big tower with an ASUS A8N-Sli Deluxe motherboard all watercooled except the graphics card and the psu. Since the nforce4 chipset also is watercooled there is a custom built cooler on top of it with the water vents at the top. The problem was that those blocked the new card which is really huge so check if you have enough space beforehand.
The solution was to completely dismantle my computer and to turn the cooler 180° so the vents are at the bottom. This was possible since it is symmetric (luckily). i can’t remember why i did it that way back then when i built in the water cooling system but i think i wanted to make sure there is enough space on the second PCI-E slot in case i wanted to use SLI or crossfire (doh).
Other then that the new card is amazing. It’s a beast in all regards. I was able for the first time to max it all out in ‘Oblivion’ (1600×1200 HDR + all high) and it was absolutely fluid. I tried ‘Prey’, a new title based on the doom 3 engine and it was a perfect experience. In ‘Prey’ i also noticed quite a few effects i haven’t seen before on the ATI card - so those are probably SM3.
Another thing to mention is that the card is really quiet and that the fans suck air instead of blowing air out. This definitely makes sense to get cool fresh air from the outside but it is worth being mentioned. Furthermore there is a feature in the Nvidia control panel to show the current GPU temperature (i dont know if it shows it for just one of the two GPUs of a median of both or something like that) and it normally idles at around 50° C and i got it up to 73° C with ‘Prey’. There is a feature in the driver panel to be notified if the max value is reached. That value cannot be edited and is set to astounding 122° C - my god.