Well it was a rocky road.. but i'm here now.
The first thing I did was take off the heatsink and get the silicon thermal crap off there and put some geil stuff on. Since the card is so long and with the power connector being placed near the corner made it almost run right into my hard drive.. it's a very close fit...
I fired it up and XP wanted me to REACTIVATE... BUT, It wouldn't let me connect.. and I wasn't going to call ms.. they harrass you every time..
So I try to reinstall, but my raid drivers were gone.. so I had to go make a floppy of raid drivers on another comp and then reinstalled... but somehow everything was buggy and screwed up and the power management was screwy (power button made it turn off without shutdown and regular shutdown gave "it's safe to power off" message...) So I reinstalled again, installed 66.81 drivers, did some OC'ing (400/1.09 from 370/1.00) and ran some benchies...
the drivers were "futuremark approved" for 01 but not 03 or 05.. gg they don't approve anything...
With my cpu fan on low/medium the video card is now the loudest part of my system. I have a feeling however that the overclock i'm running right now isn't completely stable because there was some corruption in 05....
Benchmarks:
http://service.futuremark.com/compare?3dm05=177917
http://service.futuremark.com/compare?2k3=3253011
http://service.futuremark.com/compare?2k1=8186515