It's idling at 40-50 degrees and on load it sits around 80-83 degrees.. I think thats a bit too much, somehow i think the hsf is not seated anymore? .. Anyway, i need a better cooling solution. Theres a select few sandwich hsf items on the market, then there is watercooling. Either way i need to do something about this card.
That's a pretty normal temperature from what I've seen. But you can shrink it down a bit. Watercooling really can't be beat for cost comparison, however, that's up to you. There's a few options out there. I believe Thermaltake offer some VGA cooling solution.
That should do the trick nicely... Looks like the Stock HSF but performs very very well with almost no noise... Might take a bit of working around with power cos from what it seems, Asus likes to be different and the plugs won't work but thats only what the descript says on the site and I'm not really sure myself...
There are loads of other cooling options here too: http://www.pccasegear.com.au/category41_1.htm
Depends how much you want to spend and what you want to do with it. If you bought your water gear second hand you could do up a decent loop for fairly cheap and get some pretty nice temps. New however your looking at $60+ for a GPU block.
Your temps are quite normal, in Hobart my 7800gtx would hit a good 70+ under full load on stock cooling.
Quick solution would be to pop off the stock heatsink, remove their cheap and nasty thermal crap and put some fresh AS5 or something on it, that might work.
Already looking at watercooling now as you might know Jono. Dangerden seems to be the way to go, i dont like swiftechs and silverprops dont appear to be all copper, keeping the metal the same stops the bad nasty corrosion from happening :P ..
That Swiftech CPU block is awesome, made by Cathar, well in conjunction with swiftech, but his original waterblocks were the shiznit a year or two ago. Definately getting that. I'm trying to toss up between the swiftech pump you have Jono or an Ehiem and use it in conjunction with Innovateks screw on resovoir. Only problem there is the Eheim is an AC pump, so another plug needed.