Temperature

This is where we really want to look at the iChill.  We have seen the Inno3D super-clocked 8800 GT before but only in a trim that could burn your finger.  Aside from measuring the Inno3D 8800 GT OC's idle and load temperatures with the reference fan for comparison, we also stripped that off and strapped on a Tt DuOrb VGA cooler to give us more to chew on.  Load temperatures were attained by running Crysis for 30 minutes and checking temperatures via the internal thermal sensor on the card as shown on the temperature monitoring tab within the drivers.

The Tt DuOrb won me over a while back with its dual fans and massive radiating copper/aluminum cooling fins.  The Arctic Cooling Accelero X1 was not an overly intimidating looking cooler at first sight.  Looks were certainly deceiving.  I believe the excellent performance of the Accelero X1 was due to the increased velocity of the air flow the fan shroud generates.  Again and again we have seen that smarter cooling is better cooling.  A 19 degree drop in load temperature between the reference cooling and the iChill trimmed out unit.  Very impressive.

Overclocking

Better cooling also gave us a bit more headroom.  I keep harping on the reference speeds of the 8800 GT because Inno3D's factory overclock of 700MHz on the core and 2000MHz on the memory is amazing considering the stock timings of 600/1800 are with the same single slot cooler.  With the Arctic Cooling Accelero X1 we were able to take the core up to 757MHz which is a 20% increase over reference specs.  The memory also saw more reach with the memory hitting a maximum speed of 2134MHz which represents a 15% increase over the NVidia reference design.  Benchmarking showed about a 1.5 fps advantage from the added speed. 

Conclusion

It's hard not to love this card; awesome speed, silent and cool operation that comes complete with a three year warranty.  In a world of reference designs and vanilla products, Inno3D sets itself head and shoulders over the rest of the field with THE fastest factory overclocked 8800 GT on the market.  Coupling this with their efficient iChill cooling package was almost destiny.

The cooler's design surprised me in that it partially obscured the SLI post.  Anyone with the hard PCB style SLI bridge isn't going to be too happy about having to cut up a card like this.  All the more considering how extremely difficult it is to find GeForce 8800 GTs these days.  If you have a choice however, the Inno3D 8800 GT iChill is a hard product to match let alone beat for performance and value.  A true winner.

Pros

• Fastest 8800 GT card on the market

• Arctic Cooling Accelero X1 does excellent job

• Killer performance

• Ultra quiet fan operation

• DirectX 10 Ready

• Factory overclocked with a warranty

• SLI Ready

• Gold plated DVI outputs

• Dual DVI

• HDCP Ready

• Three year warranty

Cons

• SLI post partially obscured

• All GeForce 8800 GTs are VERY difficult to find

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