To measure the temperature of our GPU, we used NVidia's utility bundled with the drivers, which provided us with real time monitoring of the temperature. The VGA card used for our tests, as we mentioned previously, was the AOpen Aeolus 6800 Ultra. Note that the Ultra series from NVidia already has a very good cooling system with a large copper base.

First we took a screenshot of the temperature while the card was in idle with the stock cooler. Afterwards, we took some more during 3dMark03, 3dMark05 and Counter Strike, after running for some time. In all cases the resolution was set at 1600X1200 with Anti-Aliasing and Anisotropic Filtering enabled, just to make sure the GPU was working overtime. Then we did exactly the same thing after installing the NV Silencer 5. You can see the differences in the temperatures in the following table.

	Idle	Full
Stock
NV5

To measure the temperatures in idle state was rather easy. On the other hand, under full load, we had to run the tests many times. Under the same environment and gaming conditions, the GPU core had a temperature of 54 °C with the stock cooling system installed while with the NV Silencer 5, this was just 49°C. Under full load, the difference was not too great with temperatures of 65°C and 64°C respectively.

One good thing about the NV Silencer 5 is that its design vents the warm air out of the PC case, something which was not happening with the stock cooler.

The most important thing we noticed from the first moment, was the difference in noise levels. The stock cooler was rather noisy, even when the PC was only booting. Fortunately, this changed after installing the NV Silencer 5.