f13.net

I'm going to wait to play until a little later tonight because that shit is fritzing out, (yo). I hit 83C before it bluescreened. Anyway, be back later. If you come across ink and parchment, hook me up so I can get to building.

Just found out my supposedly powerful Dell quadcore system has a fucking 375 watt power supply. WTF?

I should have built my own.

Actually, 375 is adequate for most set ups with a single HD, a single vid card and a modern processor. This page here lets you put in the devices you have and tells you the power requirements:

http://extreme.outervision.com/psucalculatorlite.jsp

Niiiice. Guys were recommending a 500W PSU with an 8600 GTS. My wife isn't going to be happy, but thanks!

Re: ink and parchment, I saw some babbling on the official forums indicating that the Trader provides such things.  And he is disabled. Awesome.

Yep. I have enough shit (and between Kirth and others, more than enough most likely) to build all the walls, etc.

Except Money. Parchment is fucking expensive. Apparently.

I use this guy (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835118001) (pretty sure) in place of the stock cooler. My card runs at ambient case temperature even under heavy load. You may have to dig up the specific Zalman model for your card but it's a huge improvement.

I was playing and the game closed... my ATI drivers had a popup message that said "Your video cards temperature has reached a dangerous level. It's clockspeed has been reduced to prevent damage. Please check for excessive dust accumulation and proper airflow." (paraphrasing)

So I did just that... took the card out (Radeon X1900 512MB) and sure enough there was a dust wad stuck inside the fan assembly to make a really gross wig. I had to get out a super micro screw-driver, tear the entire fan/heatsink apart, clean it all out, and put it back together. That only took about 20min. Figuring out why my computer wouldn't boot afterwards took 2hrs... I apparently damaged one of Sata cables while I was getting the card out.

I'm running a 8600 GTS on that Dell Q6600 (with the BTX case). Works fine.

I just saw this 9600 GT (http://www.newegg.com/product/product.aspx?Item=N82E16814261002) for $114 though (Coupon Code: NV96P10).

Well I sorta typoed, I meant an 8800 GTS which is what I'm upgrading to.

From what I understand a 375 watt Dell PSU is equivalent to a normal 500 W PSU, so that shouldnt be a problem. The new card is overclocked though so cooling might be.

Don't know if they still do this, but at least back when I got my PC (3+ years back), Dell rated their power supplies by median power, not by peak output. So my 305W Dell power supply is really a 400W power supply by the way everyone else measures it.

If they're still doing that shit, your 375 is probably 500W's peak.

Nice link. I was about to upgrade my 7300 card but according to that I'd have to buy a bigger power supply, and I cant afford both for a little bit. Ahh well, a bit of money saved and a fair bit of trouble saved, at least. Nice one.

Kicking myself for ordering an 8800 GTS SSC now, but power supply would have been an issue for me on this one:

http://fxvideocards.com/ZOTAC-ZT-88XE760-FSP-GeForce-8800GTX-768MB-384-bit-GDDR3-PCI-Express-x16-SLI-ZOTAC-Video-Card-p-16277.html

$234 for an 8800 GTX 768 MB card. Yowzah.

I don't know if I did anything wrong but it said I only need 212 watts for an E6850 cpu, 8600GT vid card, 1x7200rpm HDD and 2X1GB DDR2 RAM, 2x120mm fans. Am I supposed to count empty PCI slots? I think my machine has a 550W+ PS. Maybe 600W+.

edit: ok I forgot the water cooling and 4 USB devices but still under 300W. Man, I blew it on the PS.

That value does seem awfully low, but the new processors and the 8000 series cards do have a lower power consumption than pentium Ds and the 7000 series cards. It was one of the selling points of the C2D at release.

That said, 212 watts seems terribly low and I have to wonder if that thing is as accurate as I'd like it to be.

You have water cooling on an 8600 GT?  :headscratch:

I assume the water cooling is on his E6850. But even then, not sure why that's necessary or even "wanted."

If its overclocked it might generate more heat I suppose. Admittedly I dont know a whole lot about high-end computer gizmos though - I thought liquid cooling was for dual-tricked out vid cards.

Nah, Watercooling is pretty common on processors. Problem being, most don't need them anymore, but there are a good handful that can be overclocked so much that it's a great benefit. But then, overclocking a processor seems silly to me. Just buy a faster one. Watercooling shit costs hundreds of dollars to do it right (and well).

Oh, and if it leaks.......

Overclocking a C2D is not only -relatively- easy, but due to the new nanometer architechture, not too dangerous in terms of temperature gains. You can get a ridiculous processor gain on the C2Ds with comparitively little heat gain, since the starting temps are lower than any other processor of previous generations, across platforms and companies.

It would take a bit of finess, and a bit of risk, but its entirely possible to OC a 6850 (3.0 Ghz) to something like 4. This ubernerd (http://forum.coolaler.com/showthread.php?t=154068) has gotten it up to 4.3 on air. He is, admittedly, some kind of world OC champion. yes, there is such a thing.

Watercooling for the GPU actually would make more sense than OCng the CPU, since the 8800s will run hotter than a C2D by a significant factor.

For quiet and it worked nicely. But yes, I only did it because I was curious about water cooling and it wasn't any more expensive than the fanless cpu heatsink upgrade.


See above. Prices have come down a lot. Now, one might argue that if it was cheap it wasn't done well. If so, then I learn something the hard way!  Your point about dual core processors probably not even needing extra cooling is a good one, though.

Here's a bit of scary on the overheating bit. Last night I installed that Zalman v1000 + RHS88 combo on my 8800GTS and could not get the Fanmate bit working right. I thought it was working right at first. I could swear I heard the fan kick on and off while playing AoC for a few minutes. I had the Fanmate turned all the way up. But I logged out and opened up the nVidia temp monitor and saw it at 345F  :ye_gods: It shut itself down before I could even move to do it myself, thankfully. Anyways, I let it cool down a bit while praying the thing didn't get damaged. It didn't look like it, but holy hell did that scare the pants off me. I really didn't feel like slapping down another 300 or whatever for a new card since by removing the old heat sink, I killed the warranty. Anyways, I unhooked the Fanmate part and hooked the fan directly to the MB, crossed my fingers, and turned it on again. Works like a charm now and I'm getting 60C - 62C while playing AoC.

So, be warned if you set one of these up. Make damn well sure that Fanmate is working properly or just say screw it and let software control the fan speed.

Be careful guys with that link, I would not take it seriously. It considers all pheriperals to be powered by the same line which is not what happens for real.
A computer PSU has different power lines with different voltages, and depending on what you are powering you might need more amperes on the 12v or on the 5v, which means that in theory a 10.000W PSU could not be sufficient to power a PCI-E graphic card, because it might have very few amperes on the +12V line.

My suggestion is to always buy a good, branded (expensive) PSU, like Corsair, Antec, Enermax.

This is true, and in particular, with Dell PSUs. As someone mentioned earlier, they are build with different load capacities per voltage rail than 'regular' PSUs, so a 300 watt Dell may actually have more juice on the 12 volt rail than an aftermarket 400 watt PSU.

The guilde itself is a rough outline of what one can expect. As they themselves state on the page I linked :

"Rise from your grave..."

BTW, in an effort to stop my card from melting i downloaded the Ntune utility from Nvidia and have been manually controlling my graphic's card fan with it prior to playing AoC. 

Made a HUGE difference with my card no longer approaching sun like temperatures.

I have a friend with 2 SLI 9800GX2s. AoC seems to crash out due to heat after about an hour.

Tell him to take one of those penis-extensions out of his computer.

Here's a fun fact... water cooling does not cool any more than heatsink+Fan cooling. It just does it a lot quieter.
If you want the ultimate in ambient cooling, just put the biggest heatsink you can find on your CPU and GPU, the pull the case cover off your box and stick a window fan in front of it. It'll be loud as hell, but it will get you damn near room temp on most of your components.

If you want bellow room temp, then you need one of them shnazy heat pumps that are like $600. But then you gotta worry about condensation.

Water cooling if properly done gives better cooling than heatsink+fan. You're bleeding off the heat on the outside of the case. An all-in-one cheap wc solution with a radiator stick in the 5.25" bays is not properly done.

And sticking a box fan in the side of your box is stupid. Good airflow across your heatsinks and out of the case gives great cooling. And peltiers can be gotten cheap, you still need to meve that heat out of the case though. I've seen a water/peltier setup that kept everything at an even 70F.

But gx2s run fucking hot, and only vent some of that out the back slots. Having 2 in a case is overkill and a heating nightmare.

These PCI slot fans  (http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=2010110573+1372526581&name=PCI+Slot+Case+Cooler) do help somewhat with video card generated heat. That said, they can be loud as heck.

I liked NTune.  Unfortunately the fucking thing wouldn't keep any of my settings.  And for whatever reason when I installed NMonintor, which was supposed to be its replacement, it wouldn't let me control the fan speed.

Since then, I've used RivaTuner.  I don't have anything right now that's monitoring temps, but I've got it set at 70% fan speed and haven't had any problems.  50% fan speed worked fine for WoW and the like, but AoC tends to work my system a bit harder.

Without any sort of fan tuning, the auto-control generally fails to kick in and it tries to cool at 29% fan power.  Temps get to 80C+ very quickly and things go boom.

The far right selection after clicking the little triangle - the magnifying glass over the chip, brings up a nifty graph that lets you monitor all sorts of things, temps and fan speeds included.

You can also set it up so that the GPU temp displays in the systray, either on hover over the rivatuner icon or on its own.

Going from 625mhz->700mhz also helped immensely, if you have a better-than stock cooler I highly reccomend it.