What do we mean by "medium to long"?

Anything above 40 minutes.

Setting the card down to its "4" Turbo Boost setting (170MHz) solved the lock up and system crash problems while allowing looped benchmarks to run indefinitely, leading us to believe that heat was indeed the culprit causing the erratic behavior.

Why Sharky Extreme was able to run the same looped benchmarks in an identical test machine last week at 193MHz with the Hercules Dynamite TNT2 Ultra card is anyone's guess. Clearly we either got an exemplary card from one vendor and a merely average card from the other, or there are dramatic differences in the quality of the TNT2 Ultra chip yields that Diamond and Hercules are receiving from nVidia.

Whatever the reasons for the disparity two facts are certain: Hercules is setting and shipping their TNT2 Ultra product at 175MHz with the potential to clock it higher while Diamond is setting and shipping their TNT2 Ultra card at 150MHz with the potential to clock it higher.

Verdict: Diamond's In Control 99 app teaches the world a lesson on why simple "reference drivers" do the customer a disservice.

Let's take a look at the spec sheet on the newborn Viper….