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"Radeon 9800 XT and extra cooling advice..."

It arrived yesterday morning and has so far kicked some serious ass when it comes to graphically demanding games at very nice frame rates. I have a query however. The temperature of my graphics processing unit is 67 degrees celcius (152 F). Now I'm not into all this cooling none sense but I wonder if someone could help. Firstly is this too hot? The little temp bar suggests not and its no where near full, about half way probably. Secondly, would using the noob style overclock (over drive) up the temp too high and spoil the card? Thirdly, what can I buy to cool it down that will go in my PC somewhere? I am looking for an extra fan of some sort but I am not too sure about all this cooling business and could do with a little help/point in the right direction. Finally, would a couple of extras fans increase the cards performance (without consuming too much power) considering that it would be running at cooler speeds?

One other thing, I can only seem to run Far Cry with Medium settings (Texture quality and water effects are on default Very High for the recommended count for my card) with only the 2 settings on very high. Every other game (Max Payne 2, Call of Duty, C&C Generals, Splinter Cell, Halo, Prince of Persia, Deus EX: Invisible War) runs on top whack settings with little to no slow down at all. I am thinking it is possibly a bug with the drivers and the game (currently running the Catalyist 4.10 Drivers for Windows 2000). Will this be fixed for the release of the game or am I doing something wrong?

My PC specs are:

Windows 2000 (with service pack 4)
Direct X 9.0b
Athalon 2600 + XP (clocked at 2.1 GHZ)
1GB PC 2700 RAM
Radeon 9800 XT 256mb
40GB Maxtor (7200 RPM) Hard Drive

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Merci!

That might be a better idea. Water is more effective than air, but I do feel that air is a bit safer. Plus it looks a lot tidier. Another thing that is sometimes done is to cut out the grills where case fans can be placed. Some cases have rather too much metal there, so it just gets cut out leaving just enough to screw the fans in. I'm thinking of doing that.

I currently don't have any PCI devices as everything is built on the motherboard. I am thinking about watercooler but my current case is ballax with little to no air supply. Depending on what case I find I may scrap the water cooler and just go for good ventilation.

That is a lot of stuff you are ordering, possibly pointlessly.

What is the case temperature? Remember, the GPU temp is going to be at least that. The first thing to consider is getting the airflow good.

Is the case near a wall, or anywhere else that blocks the vents in anyway? Do you have the cables tied up neatly, preferably to the case chassis? Loose cables impede airflow and as such temps raise. Also, rather than using normal ribbon IDE cables, use rounded ones. They make less of a barrier as it were to airflow.

What about air going into the case? A couple of fans at the front of the case at the bottom would take cool air into the case to replace the air that the couple of fans at the top of the case should be blowing out.

If you have several PCI cards and several slots, make sure to space them out a bit.

With overdrive and over clocking the CPU I would imagine the temp of the GPU will be over 40 degrees C.

A good watercooling kit should drop the GPU temp to 40 deg.

Just abouts to order a PCI heat extractor and a set of 3 fans to fit in where a floppy disk drive would go, a new case with front, back and side fans and possibly a water cooling kit to clip around the graphics card. Got it to drop to around 62 Degrees C but am hoping to get it to drop under 50 Degrees C.

Could also be used as a security system - processors in the future will get so hot, thieves and intruders will be burnt when within metres.

Silent-Scope wrote:
> Lol the tempreture at the moment would be more than enough to keep it
> cool...

He he he we could have computer flaps in our doors... and keep the damn things out in the cold, keeping the monitor and keyboard etc inside..

Lol the tempreture at the moment would be more than enough to keep it cool...

UrkiE-UK wrote:
> I love my Tyan Tachyon G9600 pro.....
>
> *strokes card*
>
> *gets electric shock and tips of fingers are chopped off by fan*
>
> YYEEAARRGGHH!!

*Also realises that hes static fried his card