Yeah, so what eh? Well, about 6 weeks ago my video card died. It wasn't a fantastic video card, but it got the job done for the most part. Like 90% of the video card failures, this was due to the cheap-ass stock fan that came with it. I bitched and moaned about it, pulled out my old reliable crap card (no fan!), and played EVE-Online since it was the only game I could get more than 10fps on without having the pixels be so large that they scared the cats.
Now, before you guys start thinking I'm an ATI fan, let me say I've owned far more Nvidia cards, and ALWAYS been happier with them. Unfortunately, my old 6800XT died (fan failure) and in that case it also nuked some of the chips as well... the x1950 was on sale for dirt-cheap at the time.
Well, I have been shopping for a new computer on my super-limited budget for a few months now, and have actually picked up a case, power supply, shiny new video card, and a bunch of fans. I'm hoping to get the motherboard/cpu/memory this week, and if my credit card will handle it, and some hard drives next month. A thanks goes out to Mr. Rand, who gave me his old motherboard/cpu/memory... unfortunately, I couldn't get it to work... even with the new video card (which better work! I have no PCI-express machine to test it in), but if it had worked I'd be up and running with it now.
In the meantime, I found this gem! Yes, it's a BIG fan, and it was a pain to get that sucker installed... You have to first install heat sinks on each RAM chip and let them sit for a day so the heat-transfer tape cures. THEN slap some arctic silver on the monster heat sink/fan thing, assemble it with a whole cadre of nipples, screws, springs, washers, and slowly tighten the four post screws so you don't crack the chip. But... it seems to have worked! I have no way to measure the actual temperature because ATI sucks and didn't include a thermal sensor on my card, but running FurMark for 10 minutes didn't show any artifacts and the air coming out of the back was nice and warm.
Thus, I can now play other games again. It's still an older card, so until I can afford to finish my new machine, it's still gonna be a bit choppy in Dalaran, and no Crysis for me... but EVE looks stunning with everything turned up, and all my other games work again.
If anyone DOES have a spare PCI-express (version 1!) card they were going to throw away, I would continue trying to get Rand's old motherboard working... the fans spin up and I get no post codes so it MIGHT be trying to boot... just no video so I can't tell.
In any case... time to go blow things up. :)
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