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Too true. This is the price people pay for high end graphics cards with hot
chips and lots of memory. The cards consume a lot of electrical power and
produce a lot of heat which must be ventilated somehow. The space between an
AGP slot and an adjacent PCI slot is narrow, leaving little room for a
ventilating fan capable of moving many cubic feet per minute of air. The space
between slots does not really allow air to circulate freely either.
There are differences in the quality, ventilating capacity and size of cooling
fans used on graphics cards.
Nevertheless, the fact that nVidia cards are made almost exclusively by
manufacturers with widely varying quality standards (i.e. literally ANY company
willing to pay the price for the chips) argues against nVidia cards as a whole.
Still, there may be some nVidia chipset cards that are designed with reliability
in mind, and to provide adequate ventilation in a wide range of conditions.
ATI sells cards under its own brand name and also licenses its designs to other
manufacturers. I would recommend only ATI's own brand of cards rather than
others, for the same reason cited above re. nVidia. You pay more the ATI brand,
but you get what you pay for.
Simply stated, the slot design of personal computers, with one slot on top of
another, never anticipated the need for the ventilation requirelements of high
speed hot graphics cards with lotsa memory. If you install a newer AGP card,
try NOT to install any PCI card in the adjacent slot, or even the slot beyond.
Doing so leaves more space for air to circulate.
My experience with the repair of computers has to do with older computers, some
with as little as 8MB on-board memory and with slower and cooler graphics chips.
And cards wear out in such a limited environment. Now take that experience and
extrapolate it to graphics chips running twice as fast and controlling up to
256MB of memory. Imagine how long a card will last if it is made in a shoddy
manner. Speed kills. Kills graphics cards... Ben Myers
On Sun, 31 Oct 2004 03:26:54 GMT, kony <spam@spam.com> wrote:
>On Sat, 30 Oct 2004 22:13:12 GMT, ben_myers_spam_me_not @
>charter.net (Ben Myers) wrote:
>
>>Your comments make sense. My perspective is a little more trailing edge,
>>servicing, upgrading and refurbishing computers... Ben Myers
>>
>
>Yet there is nothing particularly unique about ATI card's
>fans to make then last any longer, it is the weakest link on
>many cards regardless of GPU brand on it.