its definitely an improvement. still, its rather dissapointing that the fan didt make that good a difference. does opening windows help or make it worse?

There's not really any windows nearby which could make a difference. Just a skylight about 20 feet away and a tiny little window. Neither are actually near enough to the PC to help with air circulation. Also both tend to be open anyway in this weather.

Oh well. I'm more worried about the mysterious system crash I got last time I was playing Kane's Wrath. The game started freezing for less than a second at a time. Basically stuttering intermittently. Then it suddenly shut off the display on the screen entirely, replacing it with the HDTV monitor's standard "no signal" screen.

I've never seen something like that happen before. It definitely can't have been the GPU overheating since it was actually running cooler than ever before. Could be completely unrelated to the speed controller and RivaTuner, of course. I wonder if it was just a completely random problem with the game/graphics driver.

What's odd is, before I got the latest GPU driver update, I never got this kind of crash. It always used to give a BSOD with a message about the nv4_disp display driver having malfunctioned. Something like that. This was just a complete ceasing of video feed from the PC to the monitor. It was making a repeated sound over and over like systems often do when they crash. Resetting the PC started up windows with no problem at all. Everything ran fine afterwards.

So... that was a little odd. I guess I shouldn't be too worried unless it does it again.

EDIT: Actually, it sounds a lot like the problem this guy is having...
http://www.evga.com/forums/tm.asp?m=100743369
Black screen for him. Blue screen for me. But either way, it's the monitor not getting a signal. I also got looping sound like he did.
Seems everyone's suggesting it's due to a driver problem. I bet it IS the new Nvidia drivers. Goddamit.

what about rolling back to an older driver? sometimes that might help with issues like this.

The older driver just had a different crash. The new driver supposedly improves performance in a lot of games.

Anyway, Nvidia drivers just seem to be a bit crap and unstable in general. I've ALWAYS had one BSOD display driver crash screen of one type or another, ever since I started using this video card. Oh well. I've not had the same problem again so far, anyway.