First impressions on MSI 7900GTO Silent 512 + benches

So, at last an upgrade. Last one was 2 years ago when i got me XFX 6800GT 256 AGP. Decided to move away from AGP, slowly, so bought Asrock 939Dual SATA-II mobo and yesterday got me 7900GTO installed.

So, first impressions. Its absolutely HUGE. To compare to my old 6800GT, anyways. Heatpipes, dual card form factor, with direct "out of case" exhaust. Which is good. Noise levels are on par with Zalman VF700-Cu, that was on my old 6800GT. Which is also good.

One peculiarity though - it also doubles as sound card I'm partly joking. But i can swear, that, while playing F.E.A.R (or rather navigating its menus) i can hear faint buzz coming out of this board. How do i know ? The sound wasnt there with 6800. And sound pitch changes as i navigate the menus. Its faint enough to vanish after i closed my case tho. totally bizarre. Should i be worried ? And, no, its not an electric noise thru the speakers. I use X-Fi, so it woud be very obvious...

Ok. Back to business.
I performed some light benchmarking on my old 6800GT to compare the performance gain after upgrade. Some disturbing things to report too.

My test rig is as per sig, sans 6800GT.

3DMark03 - 11170 before, 18985 after
3DMark05 - 4908 before, 8789 after
3DMark06 - 2304 (988, 882, 853) before, 4599 (2403, 2222, 852) after

As you can see, the newer technology used, the better performance gained.

Aquamark3 - ~60000 before, 72000 after, which completely sucks... ? how so ?

F.E.A.R brobably benefitted the most from this upgrade. I tested with internal benchmark, all set to maximum and at 1280x960 resolution (maximum allowed on my rig, or is it limited by the game to this res? Cant get 1280x1024).
So, before i had Min 14, Avg 31, Max 73 fps. After upgrade i scored more than twice: Min 31, Avg 60, Max 139.

The worst performer was FarCry. Maybe i did something wrong, but performance actually dropped ? Before i had 59 fps at 1280x1024, ultra settings, no AA, no AF. The score after upgrade surprised me. I have LOST some 5-10 framer per sec... ????????? Shocked Someone explain this to me, until i get nuts thinking what i did wrong while benching...

The card also runs very hot. I mean not "core hot", but heat exhaust hot. Core is kept to more or less Zalmanish temps (~47-50 at all times, load or no load), but heatsink and heat tubes are red hot (well, maybe not red, but i cant touch them). That wasnt the case with Zalman VF700. And although Zalman expelled air inside the case it never ran so damn hot. Explanation would be nice.

All the tests have been done on stock clocks (650 Core / 1320 Mem).

One game, that was not really playable with 6800GT was Medal of Honor: Pacific Assault" now it runs like a charm. Weee, jap gutting time

So, anyone have to add anything to all of that ?

P.S. Overclockability is not tested thoroughly for now, but this i can say - memory is easily overclocked to GTX specs without any instabilities. Actually i got 680 out of core and 1600 out of mem and played F.E.A.R at 1280x960 at all max for some 2 hours straight - no crashes or artefacting... So, is GTO really GTO ? Or is it truly GTX in a hide of GTO ?