A Three Hour Tour

Well if you read in Building my first PC, you’d know I was having video card issues – the GeForce 7200 card was running too hot.  My case doesn’t get much ventilation down there.

So I bought a Zalman VGA cooling fan, thinking I’d hook it up to the card.  A large fan would provide better cooling and be quieter than the tiny excuse for a fan that comes with the card.

It didn’t fit! Despite claiming compatability with the GeForce 7xxx series cards, it didn’t fit the 7200!  So I did the most logical thing and returned the video card.  The video card? Now that I had a fan, I wasn’t worried about those tiny noisemakers from before.  I now have a GeForce 8500 card, with DirectX 10 support, and a nice quiet fan.  My graphics performance subscore jumped to 4.8!

All in all, I’d say I have pretty good performance for the price.  I still need to run some tests on it (Prime95) and perhaps try overclocking it a bit, provided it doesn’t become too hot or less stable.