Annoyances

[mdlbear]

Picked up a couple of chipset coolers yesterday hoping to silence the video card that I borrowed from work a week or two ago. Only to find that the heatsink is glued onto the chip, and the fan is non-standard. I am now looking for an AGP video card that's old enough to be fanless and new enough to have a DVI connector. That, or banish it to the bedroom recording studio with an old, quiet video card and the Delta-1010 sound card. Need to do that anyway, since it's time to start recording again. I'm going to go down to Micro Center this afternoon and rummage through their bargain bin, if they have one this week.

My left shin is grumping at me; I'll probably have to take it easy on my walk today. Rose garden, I think.

The office is a mess. So's our bedroom, which I told the kids I'd clean up (as part of a challenge which we all failed miserably at).

Comments

Fanless Video Cards

[andyheninger.livejournal.com]

Assuming that you're not needing high-end 3d performance, fanless video cards are available, and relatively cheap

AGC, typo for AGP?

Something like
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814127181



There are many others.
I refuse to own a video card with a fan, for reasons of noise.

Re: Fanless Video Cards

[mdlbear]

AGP, right. will fix.

Of course, it's NVidia, so drivers would be a bit of a hassle, but I'll have to see if I can find something similar locally.

I don't like fans in my video cards either; this one was borrowed from work (out of my old desktop system, which I'd stopped using because it was too noisy -:P ) because the video quality through VGA plus my KVM switch was noticably bad on the new monitor.

Re: Fanless Video Cards

[eleccham.livejournal.com]

Wait - I thought that NVidia was the better choice for Linux drivers...? Or was that before the AMD spec release?

I'm a bit behind on video card stuff; it's not been very relevant to me since I was doing the raytracing work.

Re: Fanless Video Cards

[mdlbear]

That was before the spec release, and in any case older AMD cards (like this one) work fine with the old free driver.

The difference the spec release is likely to make probably won't be seen for a few more months.

Re: Fanless Video Cards

[mdlbear]

NVidia has always been very good about keeping up to date with their drivers, but having to go outside the distribution's main repository to get them has always been a hassle, and there's always the risk that your distro's kernel and X are too new or too old to work with the drivers they make available.

Re: Fanless Video Cards

[mdlbear]

Found a nice Radeon 9250 card for $40. Just plain dropped in and worked.

Re: Fanless Video Cards

[eleccham.livejournal.com]

Ah, less relevant then; my understanding is that a little bit of prying with a cushioned screwdriver will pop the glue on those heatsinks; after that, a little bit of superfine sandpaper leaves you a nice smooth surface.

Never done it myself, though.

Re: Fanless Video Cards

[mdlbear]

The fact that it was "borrowed" from work made going out and getting a new card a much easier decision, even though the machine it was ganked from is currently out of service.