On Wed, Sep 28, 2005 at 09:56:39PM -0700, Bob Miller wrote: > > With NV chipsets, you have two options at this point, nForce3 (AGP) and > > nForce4 (PCIe). It is not a challenge to see why I chose the > > latter. > > I have fanless VGA coolers in both my tower boxes. (Zalman ZM80A, I > think. It wraps around both sides of the board and uses heat pipes to > distribute the heat.) I like that a lot, as VGA fans are nasty little > whiners.
Yeah, I don't know if I could FIT a fanless video cooler into aelita once I have the Blue Ice installed. > For that reason (and others like mature open source driver support) I > use older-generation RADEON 9000 cards which don't produce much heat. > Obviously, I am not a gamer. > > Anyway, are there PCI Express cards that can be passively cooled? > Or am I going to be stuck with AGP next time around? Some of the NV 6600's are passive cooled. I think all of the 6200s are. I don't think you'll get either one with 3D support in open sourced drivers. ATI stopped releasing specs to allow open source drivers after they had obtained the recommendation from several people as the company to buy your video card from. Combined with other shenanigans like advertising far and wide that their cards (when overclocked) are faster than NV cards (when not) and leaving out the parentheticals, deliberately reducing quality to speed up benchmarks for certain games (their second round of which tried to do so ONLY when benchmarking), that ATI's own drivers have been buggy pieces of crap since before the first Radeon was released, the fact that ATI released a driver that would let you make walls transparent in video games, and that ATI cards tend to cost more than the nearest equivalent offering from NVidia has caused me to stay far, far away from ATI. > > enough SATA ports that you will NOT run out > > How many would that be? I'm perpetually out of PATA slots in my > current boxes. > > There's a chance that I'm going to need to spec out a new tower when I > start my new job, so this is of more than academic interest to me. > I'm going to be compiling big piles of C++ all day long, so I'll want > the best performance I can get everywhere except graphics. And I want > the box to be inaudible, since I have to sit next to it all day long. As you saw, there were 8. The NVidia four were SATA 300 with (software) RAID, and the offboard four are 150 with support for RAID 5 (possibly also software, but I haven't looked that up yet.) _______________________________________________ EUGLUG mailing list [email protected] http://www.euglug.org/mailman/listinfo/euglug
