5punk

As many of us are gearing up for DirextX 10 with Fista, it will as we all know require an upgrade of gfx card. As the most sensible option will more than likely be to get an upgrade to the Nvidia 8 series cards i highly recomend picking up on of these:



and putting under the circled area:



the built in exhaust on the 8 series is good, but as these are the quickest cards EVAR they do need a little help. Hope this helps 5punkers.

Chicken - is to giving advice on cooling what Rod Hull is to giving advice on how to get a better TV picture.

Do you have 2 strapped to your head Princess Leia style?

Think I already have one of those.

Was looking for replacement coolers for 8800 cards when I did a spec the other day, but there don't seem to be any around yet, or at least none that specifically mention that they fit and perform better than the stock cooler.

You know, I'd really not use up 3 slots to cool a fucking videocard.


just me.

Might as well if you have them spare and if it's overheating. I've hardly got anything in my slots nowadays.

I've filled all the slots in my PC including the one right next to my videocard. I've got a TV Tuner, soundcard, and wi-fi card, which takes up all 3 of the PCI slots my mobo has. Thank god my videocard only has a single slot cooler or I'd have to dump the tuner card. To be perfectly honest, nVidia and AMD/ATI need to get their fucking act together and stop releasing these super power hungry, furnace cards. If Intel can go from the Pentium D to Core 2, and to difference in power consumption and heat generation that is, so can they, and they need to fast. This shit is getting out of hand.

deject wrote:I've filled all the slots in my PC including the one right next to my videocard. I've got a TV Tuner, soundcard, and wi-fi card, which takes up all 3 of the PCI slots my mobo has. Thank god my videocard only has a single slot cooler or I'd have to dump the tuner card. To be perfectly honest, nVidia and AMD/ATI need to get their fucking act together and stop releasing these super power hungry, furnace cards. If Intel can go from the Pentium D to Core 2, and to difference in power consumption and heat generation that is, so can they, and they need to fast. This shit is getting out of hand.

That's a fair point actually. Pentium 2 anyone?

deject wrote:AMD/ATI need to get their fucking act together and stop releasing these super power hungry, furnace cards. If Intel can go from the Pentium D to Core 2, and to difference in power consumption and heat generation that is, so can they, and they need to fast. This shit is getting out of hand.

Well, PCI-E 2.0 can allow external cabling, and I can imagine that either it will get all external, or we hit the brick wall in graphic rendering (well, they do say this every decade), which gives us time to make more efficient, smaller cards.

I completely agree with you Deject, the graphics industry is getting ridiculously out of hand. Whereas the CPU industry seems to be doing what it should be; creating more efficient methods and versions all the time rather than cramming more of the same tech on boards all the time.

I feel the DAAMIT (AMD/ATI) connection can only be a good thing in this area, where AMD can supply their smaller technologies which could be translated directly to the ATI designs. And then we've got Intel designing their own GPUs other than simple integrated ones they've been making for years, likely to be out in 2008. And then there's Nvidia, well, they're fucked unless they can really do something amazing.

Word on the street is that Intel are now taking GPU very seriously and want to aim at the gaming market as well as their already hugely dominated onboard graphics sector.

The more the merrier, as Nvidia & ATI have recently been questioned about price fixing, and I think the cost of new graphics cards is absolutely disgusting and holds back the PC gaming industry from the masses.

Woo Elephant Yeah wrote:I think the cost of new graphics cards is absolutely disgusting and holds back the PC gaming industry from the masses.

Well they are overpriced, perhaps more so than ever - the very first GeForce card came out at around £230 and everyone screamed about it then, although it was a revolution.

I think there's too many "current" cards on the market, though - they have to maintain some sort of price-point structure, with £25, £50, £100, £150, £200, £250++ or it makes what are currently the £25 cards - which are more than acceptable for most users, and even a number of gamers - unsellable trash.

Looking at what people are actually playing - a £20 6200 will make CoD fly and £60 for a 7600 will BeeF nicely. In the £100-200 bracket are 6800/79x0s which should cope with pretty much every current game, so the £250+ cards are only really for enthuasists, or people who are looking to futureproof their system. By the time games that really need cards like the 8800s arrive, ATi are likely to have done something, so everything drops down a price-point - we lose the one off the bottom and start all over again.

I have no idea where Intel are with their onboard GPUs - while it would be impractical to have devices which needed lots of cooling, performance around the level of the £25 cards should be possible now with hardly any extra cooling at all.

FatherJack wrote: we lose the one off the bottom and start all over again.

I have no idea where Intel are with their onboard GPUs - while it would be impractical to have devices which needed lots of cooling, performance around the level of the £25 cards should be possible now with hardly any extra cooling at all.

I think this is where the whole problem lies. Instead of making these bottom end cards run with hardly any extra cooling. Sure they could adapt these chipsets so they run without any cooling, or if they underclocked a higher chipset to this level, it definitely wouldn't need cooling. But they don't do this, they let them 'drop off the bottom'.

As for price fixing, they kinda are, but I doubt they've officially gone to each other and said "We'll set ours this if you do the same with yours", Multi Million companies wouldn't be able to get away with it. But then again, you can never be entirely sure what goes on behind the scenes. *Sits on fences*

pixie pie wrote:As for price fixing, they kinda are, but I doubt they've officially gone to each other and said "We'll set ours this if you do the same with yours", Multi Million companies wouldn't be able to get away with it. But then again, you can never be entirely sure what goes on behind the scenes. *Sits on fences*

Actually, I recently read that ATI & Nvidia are being investigated for price fixing in a recent article on engadget. So they must have some pretty strong evidence in order to take on something like that.

Woo Elephant Yeah wrote: Actually, I recently read that ATI & Nvidia are being investigated for price fixing in a recent article on engadget. So they must have some pretty strong evidence in order to take on something like that.

*Waves hand like he's waving away the issues (or like he's a faaabulous)*