The 6800 Ultra had a much deeper cooling solution than any 6800 GT I have seen. The Ultra was almost a dual slot card it was so thick. As far as I know, the GT's at stock speeds don't cook eggs. I have never owned an Ultra though. I've also put many 6800 GT's through their paces in benchmarking and playing COD 2 / Trackmania Nations / Doom III and never had any issues with heat in the long term. I have about 5 6800 GT's from various manufacturers such as Asus, Leadtek and XFX and they are all still working perfectly.

I've had one of those linked Chinese coolers on a 6800 Ultra for years and it works fine. It will hit 80C but that is a fairly typical load temperature for the 6800 cards. It's much quieter than the stock cooler (it's basically inaudible) and runs about the same temperature range.

I think 6800 is still a lead solder card. I don't see a ROHS label anywhere.

According to this testing at XBit, the 6800 Ultra consumes about 20W more power than a 6800GT. Considering that, I think the Chinese cooler would do very well on a GT.

Here is ULTRA's stock cooler.

Pretty damn solid I'd say! Pure copper, also.
But doesn't help. Here in Greece, I have an avg room temp of 29°C on summer, and the card's temperature doesn't drop below 58°C while... idle.
During gaming, it stays in the pretty ok levels of ~75°C.

Keep in mind that my card is Gainward OC version, so it's slighlty overclocked by default. Also, these temps are with brand new thermal paste.

My Ultra had a taller aluminum heat sink on the GPU. There are pics of the variations on Google images of course....

After market coolers can do a very good job at getting the gpu temp down. However, they do not always provide the best cooling for the vrm's and they get really hot.
I had this problem with a x1950xt card years ago. It came down 20 degrees celcius on the gpu but it became unstable because vrm temps went up. Had to add a fan blowing over them.

Fortunately the 6800 cards have nice separate RAM and VRM heatsinks that can continue to be used.

Yes, the x1950 had these as well. But the stock cooler blew the air over it where the aftermarket cooler didn't, at least not enough. I don't know how hot the 6800 vrm's get.

I have an 6800 ultra with stock cooling. It gets the job done and i don't overclock the card.

@GeorgeMan

I know how it feels about summer, can be pretty brutal in the southern US but thankfully not near as bad as Australia even with the humidity.

Hmm I think using that eBay cooler on a 6800GT is brave 🤣

It works well on a 5950 Ultra, but even that is beyond what the product description claim as supported. I believe it gets to maybe 50c to 60c, which is pretty good. I haven't seen anything "beefier" for that price though, so there aren't a lot of options really.

Removing the stock cooler, cleaning everything, fresh paste, maybe lubricate the motor. Should sort things out.

philscomputerlab wrote:

It works well on a 5950 Ultra, but even that is beyond what the product description claim as supported.

According to the XBit Labs article, 5950 Ultra is similar to 6800 Ultra and consumes about 20W more load power than a 6800GT. 55W vs. 75W cards.

But yeah there certainly are much more effective cooling options out there. I'm surprised what these $5 Chinese things can handle though!

I got this 92mm universal GPU cooler for 9800Pro (Overkill, I know).
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/99196890/ … ns/P1030037.JPG
It looks solid, has a replaceable 92mm fan and a huge surface. Takes a lot of space though 😀

swaaye wrote:

philscomputerlab wrote:

It works well on a 5950 Ultra, but even that is beyond what the product description claim as supported.

According to the XBit Labs article, 5950 Ultra is similar to 6800 Ultra and consumes about 20W more load power than a 6800GT. 55W vs. 75W cards.

But yeah there certainly are much more effective cooling options out there. I'm surprised what these $5 Chinese things can handle though!

Can't beat the value, no doubt. I have to admit that I only ran these on an open test bench. So likely the 5950 Ultra would be quite a bit hotter inside a case...

swaaye wrote:

My Ultra had a taller aluminum heat sink on the GPU. There are pics of the variations on Google images of course....

It's as tall a dual slot card can be. It's just the angle of the photo that doesn't help in showing that. 😀

My 6800GT came with an Arctic Cooling Silencer as stock 😉

Thank you everybody for your replies! For now, I'm going to stick with the stock cooling on my 6800GT. Since I don't intend to overclock it, I think it should be sufficient once I clean it up and reapply TIM.

While pondering my 6800GT and this thread, I was messing around with one of my other systems and noticed that the fan on my AGP 7900GS wasn't always spinning up at boot. It wasn't seized up; it just sometimes failed to start. One of the copper coils inside the fan looked a bit burnt, so I considered my options. Unfortunately, the AGP 7900GS uses a very non-standard layout and aftermarket options are extremely limited. Of most concern is the position of the HSI bridge chip. There is just no good way of cooling that thing with an aftermarket solution.

Rather than spend money and turn this into Dr. Frankenstein's own video card, I decided to just cut out the stock fan, enlarge the opening with a dremel, and bolt/epoxy a 50mm fan on top of it. It doesn't perform any better than the original stock cooler and it now takes up two slots inside the PC, but at least I didn't have to spend any cash to fix it. From what I've read, the GF7 series cards had somewhat high failure rates, so I'd rather not make any further investments in this card.