Video Card Thread (Mostly Gecube x1950xt)

Yeah, but even if I remove the vent holes, I'll be left with a rectangular hole, and the circular grill won't cover the hole completely, right?

 

No, but surely neither will the square grille? They're both 120mm x 120mm square.

 

Well, Sam, something is probably being lost in the translation from English to English. =P

But if you lay a 120mm diameter circle over the top of a 120mm square, the edges of the square stick out past the circle. That's why Pi is not 4, but something less at 3.1415926535 (anyway 3.1416. My brother used to know it to 100, and I read that some dude knows it to 1000 places!)

My point being that the area of a circle is Pi x R squared, while that of a square is 4 x R squared. The amount that 4 is larger than Pi, is the amount you are going to see under that circular grill cover - bad bling!

So yes, the square grill will completely cover the hole, and no, the circular grill will not cover the hole.

Am I right, or am I missing something? (Probably the latter - they used to call me "deep") :=)

Rich

 

That's a good point. However, the grille covers all the area occupied by the fan blades, so surely whatever would be a hole is blocked up by the corners of the fan?
For the sake of argument, let's take the Scythe you'll have with the Kama bay.
(Apologies for the quality of the image, i did the resizing in paint)

The red line represents the cut off point of your 'set of holes' as it were, assuming it's 80mm x 120mm (is that the size of it?)
If you see, the top part of the fan covers 80mm x 120mm exactly. Thwe space that's not occupied by moving fan blades is occupied by the black plastic surround. Consequently there's nothing else there. All the square mesh grille would give you extra would be square holes over the top of the black plastic.

 

Sam,

Really nice picture - I appreciate your effort on doing that for me because, as you could tell, I could not figure out what you meant.

I'm pasting the picture into my text file that I have, keeping me informed about all this stuff we're talking about on the forum.

(By the way, since you referred to Paint, I thought that I would mention that I use a very cheap program that is super simple compared to photoshop, called Ulead PhotoImpact, under $100. I have an old version, 4.2 that suits me fine. I got the original version free with a scanner and then I upgraded. I do, however, also own photoshop, and once in a while I use it to make a frame transparent - it is superior in this respect and in of course a lot of other ways, which you would expect for $500 versus $89. I use another adobe product, pagemaker, all the time. But I never bothered to learn photoshop, because, for one, it seems complicated to me, and secondly, by the time I got it I had already mastered the simpler one. If you want a cheap graphics program that has most of the day to day functionality of photoshop, I highly recommend Ulead. Plus I'm a friggin expert on it by now, so any questions and I'm your man! :=)

Regarding your post, you're 100% right - no hole of course, you're looking at the fan case. I see now why you were wondering if I was going to take out the vent completely and leave the hole.

What you've shown me looks good!

It is completely acceptable!

To end up with something that looks that good, however, I am forced to hacksaw out the vent holes completely, and I would need to be fairly careful and slightly neat about doing it. (And as Dinc and Travis pointed out a couple times, I would probably bloody well cut myself to pieces on the sharp case cover edges!)

The square grill would be covering parts of the case that no air is coming through, so of course, no additional airflow, in fact, less because it is more restrictive.

But from a cosmetic point of view, and ease of installation, it would cover up my mistakes. Lastly, with the square grill, I won't have to take out the vent. My plan would be to simply lay the side cover (mine comes off completely) on a piece of wood for support, draw the grill on the inside of the cover, then try to draw the circular fan part, and then take my drill and drill a mesh of holes - fitting the circular profile. I would do this a little below the present vent - 20mm above and 20mm below.

Then, with the grill on the outside, you won't see anything. Hopefully I would not lose too much airflow, and I would have a lot quicker and easier install and overall a cleaner look maybe.

And as Travis would say, "more bling" perhaps.

What do you think? Thanks very much again for clarifying that for me.

Rich

 

Of course one thing we've overlooked here is that for the same cost, you could get a case that supports better airflow to start with....
I superimposed the grille using MSphotodraw which I've half learnt how to use, but couldn't easily figure out how to resize the images, so that's why I used paint.

 

Oh, no, and have to move the mobo and run all those wires?

GOOD POINT!

Well, this is kind of like a science project that, from the standpoint of economics, might not make perfect sense. But you know how projects are, they're what you do when you want a hobby!

 

This is true. I'm obviously thinking from a Health and safety standpoint as well as financial, since you're concerned with cutting yourself!

 

Hah hah

Well you know how those hobbies are, sometimes you get hurt!

 

Indeed, by playing around with one of my fans today I broke it. Stopping it with my fingers too many times to investigate the pressure behind it. I stopped it too many times, it never started moving again, and then there was a nice burning smell... :-(
Oh well, that's the end of that silverstone fan! I've put one of my old Nexuses back in now.

 

A nice burning smell! Hah!

At least you didn't cut yourself! And since you have dozens of fans in various stages of disrepair you can just pop another one in place. Lol.

You were investigating the pressure - sounds like a silencer enthusiast to me!

I missed Raymond's comment a few pages back - change the name of the thread to x1950xt apg and fan issues. But I guess that would be to point, since to make the bloody thing work, it's all about exhausting the extra heat!

I ordered the square grill (grille as you say.)

Hey, I've got a question for you - next post.
Rich

 

As you wish.

 

Question 1: I was reviewing some of the last pages on this forum, and I came again on the discussion of the core2 duo, versus the p4 that I have. I think I bloody well forget, that the core2 duo is 64 bit, isn't that right? Intel went over to the 64 bit camp that amd had pioneered so successfully, right? So, sure, 1.8 of 64 bit power will kick ass compared to the 32 bit P4 - you said even the hottest p4 at 3.8? And we're talking only 1 of the 2 cpus.

I do have to ask, though, Sam, do video games benefit from the multiple cpu thing - I had always read that games are single-threaded and don't benefit.

Question 2. Hey you guys, nobody has commented on - should I add another $67 memory stick or not? I don't want to dump too much more money into the agp architecture, but I have 1 gig now, and only two slots. So I buy a 1 gig stick, for $67, and run 1.5 gigs, and per Travis, open my AGP bios aperture to 256mb, for max support of the Gecube with dedicated texture storage, still leaving me with 1.25 gigs of memory. Is that good, or even necessary?

Question 3. If that is a good idea, should I spend another $67 and get the second 1 gig stick (dd400 memory I believe) for 2 gigs total, but 256 mb dedicated to the AGP aperture.

What is everybody's opinion? What do you have to say about it Sam, or are you still burying your Silverstone and you will be in mourning for the next several days, thank you very much. :=)

 

sammorris

It's 6:30 pm here, so probably 12:30 after midnight in England. I finally listened to the fan files you emailed to me. They're all reasonably quiet. The NZXT at 1100 rpm (how big - are these all 120's except the yate at 140?) pushing through the mesh was fairly quiet, and the #2 nexus out in the open was really quiet - you mentioned you had turned it down, so was it still around 1000 rpm?. Yes, it was quieter, but I see, the difference between blocked and unblocked was not that bad.

The Yate Loon - your pride and joy - is noticeably more vigorous moving 83cfm at peak 1900, and I guess the wav file is displaying the full roar at 1900, since you had everything turned off? or has it throttled down already to 1600? Let's see, you said musical A at 1900 - where's my tuning fork? Not really noisy at all.

I could easily put up with any of those. Thanks for sending them.

Have a good night's rest mate,
Rich

 

Answer 1: 64-bit is pretty much a non-event. STILL. Three years after it came out on desktop CPUs, we still don't like it. Why? XP 64-bit is terrible because it has no drivers. Vista 64-bit is overly expensive, not many people who are enthusiasts (and so would want 64-bit) care for Vista, plus it's driver support is very picky (unsigned drivers are forbidden, you're not allowed to 'continue anyway')
Thing is, the Core 2 Duo doesn't need 64-bit to kick ass! The E6300 at 1.86Ghz benchmarks slightly better than an X2 4200+ at 2.2Ghz. That in turn benchmarks like a Pentium D at 3.6Ghz. The Pentium D is the dual core version of your processor, so not only are there two cores, a 1.86Ghz Core 2 duo core is like a 3.6Ghz core!
Consequently, since the 2.66Ghz E6750 is now dirt cheap, you can get a cheap CPU that's effectively like a 5.2Ghz dual core version of your CPU!

Answer 2: I'd stick with the current GPU aperture size. If you're ever upgrading to a core 2 duo on the horizon I'd stick with the RAM you've got unless you really do run out. one of my friends quite happily made do with 1Gb until recently. You'll have to get DDR2 with a Core 2 Duo, so your old memory will be useless if it's DDR1, with a P4 it probably is.

Answer 3: I'm not in mourning for the silverstone, I don't really miss it, it was far too noisy.

 

With regard to the second post:

The NZXT and Nexus fans are 120mm. The Power supply fan (Yate Loon) is 140mm. The NZXT was recorded at it's max of 1100rpm. The nexus in the recording at the beginning was at it's max of 1000rpm, I turned it down to the speeds mentioned in the email afterwards. At 500rpm or below, it's inaudible with my ear so close my hair gets mashed in the blades. So you see why I'm so pleased I could run my case fans at 500rpm!
Since I can't hear my Nexus (better fan than the silverstone) at 700rpm I currently set it at that speed.

The Yate Loon is not my pride and joy at all, my whole PC system is! (That includes the monitor and speakers!) The yate loon pushes mountains of air, but I'd rather it not have to. At lowest speed, it makes a stupid chuffing noise because of the plastic cover Thermaltake put in the power supplies that use it. it really isn't a quiet fan at all (to my ears, you probably think it very quiet!)
The wave file for it was taken at 1600rpm. That speed was induced by turning all my case fans completely off for a minute. It's idle speed is 1100rpm.

 

this has nothing to do with these posts, but since I just got the 900, I looked at my cpu temp today, and it was at 103F, which is about 20-25F less than what it used to be (overclocked still) So I decided to get some more juice out of it and Oced it to 3.756Ghz from 3.2 and moved th volts up to 1.6, which gave me the extra headroom. Now the temps are about 120F, and I wanted to see if I can get to 4Ghz... Do you think that's possible? I have a zalman cpu heatsink and 96mm fan on it by the way...

 

You're welcome to try it, but the voltage is looking a bit high already, there's more to overclocking than just heat removal, if you push the voltqage too high the cpu may only last a couple of months before it gets fried, regardless of the temperature.

 

Okay Sam.

I was not really thinking in terms of 64 bit software, like XP 64 bit, etc. I was thinking of the ability of a 64 bit chip to move twice the amount of information into the cpu per clock cycle vs the 32 bit chip, and also to perform double precision calculations in one pass without having to run the number back through the processor again.

Those are the kinds of issues that I thought made the AMD so much more powerful at slower clock speeds than the 32 bit P4.

My memory is DDR2, known as DDR400, 400 Mhz, 184 pin. Your post implied that I could take it with me later - in that case shouldn't I invest in one stick?

You mentioned your friend did fine with 1 gig.

But now with the x1950 xt agp I'll be running shader 3 and some of this other high end stuff, and I imagine texture memory at only 256 will be taxed, and could perhaps slow me down.

Wouldn't the x1950xt agp (with only 256mb memory vs. your memory of 512mb) benefit from a little texture storage help from main system memory, which it would get if I open up the AGP aperture to 256mb? (Not as good as the memory being on the board itself - but somehow for agp that doesn't work.)

 

I don't know to be honest, I never messed with AGP aperture settings, so I'm not the best person to ask in that field. For once you've found something I know nothing about!

The 64-bit technology the X2 and Core 2s have plays no role in why they're faster at lower speeds, it's simply down to a better architecture. A 1.2Ghz Pentium 3 was faster than a 1.8Ghz Pentium 4, simply because the architecture was better on the old CPU, they were both 32-bit.

As for dual core games, some do some don't, Most I'm afraid don't, but that is changing. For games like supreme commander it's pretty much a NECESSITY. Anybody who has a single core lags network games so badly they're usually voted off the server.