In Which We Have Video Card Adventures
My cards run hot. So hot that I've had to take the side off my case and set up an oscillating fan to keep the temperature in the safety zone under heavy load. So, in a moment of brilliance, I decide to buy new coolers for my GPUs. I've never had to play the Tiny Screws and Thermal Paste game before, but how hard could it be?
Well.
First of all, the heatsinks and fans were attached, not with screws, but with these little plastic bits that had to be tweezed and shoved out the holes, mostly with my tiny screwdriver. There was a slip and a scratch at one point. I do not know enough about circuity to know whether I hit a no-no zone.
After that excitement, I discovered that the thermal pads included with my new coolers stuck very well to human skin and very poorly to anything else.
Then there was a total failure of the screws to get everything flush together, resulting in my unscrewing and rescrewing everything about six times before deciding that, hey, I see no gaps of light, so we are good enough.
Then I discovered that LeadTek's boards have a non-standard plug size for the fan power. I resolved this issue with hot dremel action.
Please to be noting how many opportunities there have been thus far for serious damage to my poor cards.
When I put everything back in the case and powered it up, I got a screen full of exclamation marks and colons, with lots of extra and transposed letters. It's not every day I manage to break the display of the BIOS. Windows would not boot (the monitor claimed it had no input after the Windows loading screen, which, oddly enough, displayed perfectly), but Linux booted fine with no graphical wackiness. Confused, I adjusted all the screws again. No dice.
Then I flipped my settings from SLI to single card, put in just the card that had no screwdriver accidents, and tried again. That one works fine. It does not run as frostily as advertised, but it was also running in a rather hot room, so I'll let that slide for now.
I considered testing the second card in solo mode, then realized that I was unhappy, darn it, so I instead made myself happy with Kingdom Hearts 2. It is impossible to be unhappy when you're watching your party get sucked into the world of Tron because Donald Duck won't stop walking all over Squall's keyboard. It is also impossible to be unhappy when you finally finish all the minigames and synthesis collection (100% journal completion rate, whee!) and are leaping from your seat to yell, "In your face, Pooh-bear! In your FACE!" And then there are hugs for everyone.
I love the Kingdom Hearts series like whoa.
Well.
First of all, the heatsinks and fans were attached, not with screws, but with these little plastic bits that had to be tweezed and shoved out the holes, mostly with my tiny screwdriver. There was a slip and a scratch at one point. I do not know enough about circuity to know whether I hit a no-no zone.
After that excitement, I discovered that the thermal pads included with my new coolers stuck very well to human skin and very poorly to anything else.
Then there was a total failure of the screws to get everything flush together, resulting in my unscrewing and rescrewing everything about six times before deciding that, hey, I see no gaps of light, so we are good enough.
Then I discovered that LeadTek's boards have a non-standard plug size for the fan power. I resolved this issue with hot dremel action.
Please to be noting how many opportunities there have been thus far for serious damage to my poor cards.
When I put everything back in the case and powered it up, I got a screen full of exclamation marks and colons, with lots of extra and transposed letters. It's not every day I manage to break the display of the BIOS. Windows would not boot (the monitor claimed it had no input after the Windows loading screen, which, oddly enough, displayed perfectly), but Linux booted fine with no graphical wackiness. Confused, I adjusted all the screws again. No dice.
Then I flipped my settings from SLI to single card, put in just the card that had no screwdriver accidents, and tried again. That one works fine. It does not run as frostily as advertised, but it was also running in a rather hot room, so I'll let that slide for now.
I considered testing the second card in solo mode, then realized that I was unhappy, darn it, so I instead made myself happy with Kingdom Hearts 2. It is impossible to be unhappy when you're watching your party get sucked into the world of Tron because Donald Duck won't stop walking all over Squall's keyboard. It is also impossible to be unhappy when you finally finish all the minigames and synthesis collection (100% journal completion rate, whee!) and are leaping from your seat to yell, "In your face, Pooh-bear! In your FACE!" And then there are hugs for everyone.
I love the Kingdom Hearts series like whoa.