The fan on this card is broken; if you leave it to it's own device's, the fan never goes above default. Had to use Rivatuner to create a custom-profile.
Don't know if it's a problem with 8800GTS 512 in general, or just the ones build by Gigabyte. Seems a BIOS issue.
Don't worry too much about card overheating; as it overheats, data goes corrupt > driver crashes > load on the GPU is gone and starts to cool down. My card crapped out several times, first because of the fan issue and at other times because of that memory issue with some games. Push reset and all is well. Sometimes windows can still recover after driver crash and then it's even better.
I guess the move to 65nm process for the new GTS cards helped keep heat down as well.