Well I got the card this morning, but unfortunately didnt have much chance to play around with it, but I do have some preliminary thoughts.
First off, it seems quite noisy, at least compared to the fanless* Ti4200 I had before, but then I guess it would do. Its a beast of a card, with a huge heatsink covering the core and memory.
It went in painlessly, and noticed straight away that the 2D image quality clearly seems better than the Ti4200 (a card which was renowned for poor 2D quality), so its nice to see that Nvidia has improved the 2D quality of the card.
I fired up Painkiller, a first person shoot em up which is like the Serious Sam series - that is many enemies, and lots of mindless action, blood and guts. Before this, my machine (Athlon 2600+, 1280 Mb RAM, 333 FSB) really struggled with this game, even at 1024x768 medium detail, it slowed down very badly when lots of enemies were on the screen to the point of being almost unplayable IMO.
At 1280x1024, very high detail, the card clearly runs the game much faster than before, still with a slowdown during busy sections, but nothing like what it was - also I think the game might slow down on purpose while you are getting slashed off the knights, because the vision goes kinda funny, and it does look intentional because now I can actually control it when that happens (and I couldnt before). Not only that but unsurprisingly, the game looks far better and is more enjoyable to play.
Unfortunately, due to me being out on the drink tonight straight from work, its unlikely I'll get to have another go until tomorrow night. But I am looking forward to trying Doom 3, Far Cry, The Suffering, Splinter Cell amongst others. I'll let you know how it goes.
* Ti4200 was fanless because the fan had seized up, causing me to nearly burn my fingers when I took it out this morning
