I got my 6800 delivered yesterday from the Apple Store and found some interesting things as I installed it into my Rev. A dual 2.0 G5. It comes with a CD that has a driver install as well as a firmware upgrade for the G5 cooling system. The directions state that the fan firmware upgrade is to make it safer for the cards heat and power consumption. I did this firmware upgrade which necessitates a re-boot and forgot to install the drivers for the card and installed the 6800 and restarted only to get a kernel panic
So the drivers appear necessary to even boot the computer with the 6800 installed. I took the 6800 out, put my old 9800 in rebooted and installed the drivers and then installed the 6800 again.
One observation is that the blower on the 6800 seems about the same sound level as the fan on the 9800, maybe a slight bit more but the G5 certainly sounds louder. It seems that after the firmware upgrade for the fans the baseline of the fan speed has been raised. If for example your fans barely spun at anything under 25% CPU usage before they may spin a little faster now and as you bump up the CPU usage they appear to spin more at each point. I wouldn't say it is offensively loud but they definitely seem to spin faster even at idle. The upside of this is that with the increased circulation in the G5 the case seems to be chilly so I think it may actually keep the computer cooler than before the 6800 was in there. In CPU intensive tasks where the fans really get spooled up I don't really notice it being much louder but it is harder to tell when they get louder. The air coming out the back of the computer seems no warmer than before though so maybe the added air volume is really helping here.
The Card itself, as many of you may have already seen, dwarfs my old 9800 OEM in both size and weight. IT IS HUGE AND HEAVY. The heat sink is so massive that the back of the card is actually a steel support bracket as it might be too much for the PCB to support and subsequently crack under the weight. It takes up two PCI slots but unlike PC versions it seems to use the power from the AGP Pro slot and maybe the unused ADC power connector so no external power cables are needed. It is a very nice and tiny install. I will post pictures later and more about performance later on.
-Jerry C.
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