2 Graphic Card Questions and Windows 7

Calibos

First question relates to the Build you guys helped me with a few weeks ago. I got an Msi Twin Frozr GTX580 with it. Not only is it not running the 15ºc cooler than the reference designs like its advertised to but its actually running hotter than the reference designs. We were hitting 100ºc on furmark until I jury rigged a spare 120mm fan to blow on the card with the side panel off. Upon examination of the card I could see a lot of excess TIM squezed out of the GPU/heatsink interface. ie. more squezed out than I would have thought was appropriate to use in total!! Its idling in the high 30's(120mm fan blowing/side off)

Have I got a lemon of a GPU or was my supposedly well regarded Twin Frozr put together by some Taiwanese bloke who got distracted by a pretty girl walking past the production line while he was applying TIM to my card?

I really don't want to RMA the card and tbh I suspect I might be told there is nothing wrong with it as its only hitting the 90/100's under heavy load. Whether it or not HWVS/MSI say thats OK temps, I and a doubt many of you would be comfortable with a card running that hot especially when the promotional blurb for the Twin Frozr talks about 15º below reference of 85º, ie. 70ºc With that in mind and seeing as there doesn't seem to be any warranty stickers over the screws, it seems to be a risk free option to re-apply new TIM myself. So...TIM recommendations please!!

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Second GC question relates to the Dell XPS Gen 4(2005 vintage) that got mothballed with the arrival of the new build. Its been given to another family member. I did the mother of all cleanups on it. In fact its looking better inside now than it ever did when I had it Totally de-dusted/grimed it, cable managed it, dremeled off bits of the stock fan that came with the i5 2500K so I could fit it to the Dells 3.4ghz Pentium 4 shrouded Heatsink to aid cooling. Took a template of the grill pattern from my 600T case and drilled out grill holes on the 5.25" blanking plates to improve airflow for the P4. Even did the XPS PSU. Its funny, I remember scratching my head for a few hours a few years ago trying to figure out how to open it up to do the same job years ago. Figured it out in about 1 minute this time round (Don't worry, I knew not to touch the capacitors )

Anyway, best improvement I made to it?? Installing Windows 7 Home Premium 64bit from the OEM disc I bought with the new build. Wow!! Me really likey Windows 7. I was sceptical about this OS after my experiences with my brothers Vista laptop. I had heard that Windows 7 was what Vista should have been, ie. bells and whistles of Vista but the stability and speed/footprint of XP but I figured this was bullsh1t after trying out the brothers dog slow Win 7 Sony Vaio laptop.

Well I now realise that the problem was my brother and Sony and not Windows 7. ie Sony fill it with crap, brother doesn't have the sense to uninstall the crap, adds more crap, lets it all startup at boot etc. I just never had the patience or time to diagnose all that before and just let it colour my perception of Windows 7. Well not only does it run great on the 6 year old single core P4 Dell XPS Gen 4 but it runs very well on the brothers 4 year old Dell Inspiron 1501 (AMD X2 64 Turion T50) Vista laptop that had been consigned to the great PC rubbish bin in the Sky (ie. The attic ). Needs another gig or two of ram of course which thankfully is pennies at the moment and it needs a new keyboard as a few keys are non functional. €25. It was replaced and consigned to the attic for random shutdowns. Well after finally digging it out and opening it up this week, I found out the reason. I solid 1cm thick carpet of dust between the fan and heatsink. After cleaning it up inside the laptop is basically fine other than needing a new keyboard and an extra gig or two for Windows 7!! Its going to make a fine general purpose non gaming machine for anyone who wants it around the house. While on the subject of laptops, I'm thinking that it might be worth my while fixing a dead 2.4ghz Core Duo Dell 17" Vostro thats lying around too. Mainboard blown. With discrete graphics, a spare 2.5" bay for a 64gb SSD, an extra 2 gigs of ram to bring it to 3 or 4 (depending on whats in the slots now) and with Windows 7 installed this could be a really nice machine again.

In terms of the non graphics card upgrades for the XPS desktop, I know there is nothing I can do about the processor. However is it worth fitting more Ram to the 2 gigs thats already in the machine. I opened up all the programmes that would be used on this PC at the same time and Coretemp told me 60% of the 2 gigs of ram was being used. I never have that many programmes open at the same time anyway. ie. Is 2 gigs pretty much all I'll need on these machines. In which case I'll just upgrade the INspiron to 2 gigs from the 1 it currently has. (The XPS and the Vostro laptop already have 2 gigs).

I can't seem to find which generation of SATA is in the the XPS or Vostro Lappy. Would a 64gb Crucial M4 SSD be a waste in either or both of these machines?

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I'm running the Inspiron Laptop and XPS with 26 days left on the trial period at the moment. I've read about the reg tweaks/dos commands to extend that trial period to 360 days, so I won't have to worry about licence keys for all these machines till next year anyway. That said, I think I'll be tapping my aunt who works in Redmond for some licence keys next time I am talking to her

Which brings me back to my second Graphics card question which I started 4 or 5 paragraphs ago (I've a tendency to go off on tangents )
XPS Gen 4 has 1 PCI-E x16 slot which suprised me. Is PCI-E going that long! Was there not a standard between PCI-E and AGP. Anyway, an ATI X850XT Platinum edition currently resides in that slot. Physically its looking mucho grimey and while its not glitching once I get to the desktop there is some glitches in the form of 2 rows/lines of multicoloured pixels that flash/flicker over the animated Windows 7 start-up logo. That combined with stuttering on a 1080P youtube video today made me think that it might be worthwhile upgrading the graphics card to something that doesn't look like its about to die and that can take some of the load off the old P4 CPU when watching video. ie. I don't need a card capable of gaming. So is there anything in the 50-60 euro range that is better than the old ATI X850XT. I don't know enough about the architectures to ensure I wasn't buying something that was actually lower spec than the 6 year old card currently in the machine.

All advice very much appreciated.

BTW, I hope I haven't initiated the 'TLDR' response

Shy_Dave!

I'll leave the rest to the experts but to respond to your first issue:
A modern-day card idling in the high 30's I would say is fine.
With the Twin Frozr line being advertised as a better cooling system I would agree you have a problem with it hitting 100 on Furmark (Although that being said Furmark would bring any modern card easily past 85).

I guess I'll ask how you have you fan profile setup? For some models/makes just having your fan on auto isn't good enough.
How are the temperatures after say an hour in an intensive game? Nothing will heat it up as much as Furmark does.

Tea_Bag

god that took ages to read cause i kept getting distracted

id definatelty apply new TIM to the 580. icey diamond 7 is the best apparently, and can be had pretty cheap on ebay.

i use arctic silver 5 and its good enough. if youre around Limerick you can borrow some of mine cause ive got a spare tube.

throw a 6450 into the P4 rig and youll get some more life out of it. id assume the Dell XPS psu would handle that cause they're usually atleast a good 350W

as for your W7 licence problem, Windows server 2008 is free and with a few tweaks and a skin you'd never know it wasnt W7.

Tea_Bag

just for a comparison of the furmark temps, we were testing my housemates PC just yesterday on it and he never exceeded 82 degrees.... running 2xCF6970's with reference coolers and no extra fans or anything. i know a 580 is hotter but its shouldnt hit 100. its also in a 600t btw.

Calibos

Shy_Dave! wrote: »

I'll leave the rest to the experts but to respond to your first issue:
A modern-day card idling in the high 30's I would say is fine.
With the Twin Frozr line being advertised as a better cooling system I would agree you have a problem with it hitting 100 on Furmark (Although that being said Furmark would bring any modern card easily past 85).

I guess I'll ask how you have you fan profile setup? For some models/makes just having your fan on auto isn't good enough.
How are the temperatures after say an hour in an intensive game? Nothing will heat it up as much as Furmark does.

I've set the fan profile in afterburner to 40º-40% 60º-60% 80º-100% etc Actually what benchmark are you guys running. I'm getting those temps running the 1080p benchmark. Its hitting 95ºc running the BF3 Beta on Ultra at 1920x1200

Tea_Bag wrote: »

god that took ages to read cause i kept getting distracted

id definatelty apply new TIM to the 580. icey diamond 7 is the best apparently, and can be had pretty cheap on ebay.

i use arctic silver 5 and its good enough. if youre around Limerick you can borrow some of mine cause ive got a spare tube.

throw a 6450 into the P4 rig and youll get some more life out of it. id assume the Dell XPS psu would handle that cause they're usually atleast a good 350W

as for your W7 licence problem, Windows server 2008 is free and with a few tweaks and a skin you'd never know it wasnt W7.

I googled that card as you do and on the one hand you have people saying its crap (Though more than good enough for what I said I wanted from it) but on the other hand I looked at some of the gameplay video's using it and they looked pretty darned good. Just shows how out of the loop I was graphic card wise. Can a 30 euro card really run Crysis and GTA like the videos I saw!! Thats kind of got me thinking. If I up the budget to 60 or 70 is there anthing better by ATI/AMD NVidia gaming wise that won't be bottlenecked too much by the oul P4. Perhaps moreso an NVidia card with VDPAU for video acceleration with XBMC. The brother who I am giving the old dell to said he wasn't too interested in games but when I showed him the youtube vids of the HD6450 in action his interest was piqued.

I don't really have a W7 licence problem. I can run it for free for a year and worst case scenario I buy a family licence for 3 PC's when they are on special, which is what? 150 euros? I could even reformat every year to restart the activation clock However, I am sure my aunt working in Redmond will come up with the goods. I'm her Godson and she hasn't bought me a birthday present in donkeys years

Monotype

Calibos wrote: »

XPS Gen 4 has 1 PCI-E x16 slot which suprised me. Is PCI-E going that long! Was there not a standard between PCI-E and AGP. Anyway, an ATI X850XT Platinum edition currently resides in that slot.

We're on PCI-E 2 now, going on for PCI-E 3. The X850 was an early PCI-E card with the graphics world only switching over from AGP around then.

It's a lot shorter than PCI which has been around nearly two decades.

Calibos

Some info I have picked up is that the XPS gen4 had a 450W PSU with 32 amps. The PCI-E x16 slot is PCI-e 1.0. The 2.0 cards are backwards compatible right. What am I missing out on with a 1.0 slot? The X850XT has a 4 pin PCI-e power connector from the PSU. I'm kinda thinking now with CUDA and VDPAU acceleration helping the main CPU in a lot of applications these days that I might stretch up to 100 euro to max out the potential of this old workhorse. Theres another 5 years left in her if the 2001 Dimension 8200 that finally ends its handmedown journey in the dustbin this week is anything to go by

So what does the new budget open up and at what point do I say enough is enough and theres no point in a higherspec when its limited by a 2005 3.4ghz P4