[rescue] x86 power question

[Bryan Gurney]

On Mon, 27 Nov 2006 00:55:27 -0500, Andrew Weiss <ajwdsp at cloud9.net> wrote:

> On Nov 18, 2006, at 6:48 PM, Phil Stracchino wrote:
>
>> Andrew Weiss wrote:
>>> I have GeForce 7800GT's in both my Quad G5 and Nancy's Ultra 20.
>>> It's a good card.  Hers is the overclocked BFG edition.
>>
>> How do you like those?  What's the overall stability like?
>
> I like them a lot.  They have had zero stability issues in both XP
> and OS X Tiger.
>
> Latest game on the PC is Elder Scrolls IV Oblivion.  The last game I
> played on the Mac was Stubbs the Zombie.
>
> Andrew

As for me, I have a 7900GT in my Athlon 64 X2 3800+.  It's pretty solid; I  
haven't had a freeze-up in a while.

I did have a 7800 GT from XFX from when I first built the system back in  
December 2005, but I ran into this nagging freeze-up that would occur  
either after 45 to 90 minutes of Doom 3 or Quake 4, or reliably after 5  
minutes of Lost Coast.  The temperature sensor in the desk.cpl (Display  
Properties) control panel applet snap-in seemed to read a bit high (in the  
low 70 degrees C range) during a run of Doom 3, and it spiked in the high  
70's in Lost Coast.  It's irritating to have a card that can do HDR, but  
freezes up when trying to play a game that demonstrates HDR.  I lived with  
it for a little bit, until May, when I decided to roll the dice by buying  
a 7900 GT (I had performed successful test runs of Memtest86+ and two  
instances of Prime95 to isolate the videocard as the culprit).  Haven't  
had a freeze-up since.

I still have that 7800 GT kicking around, but I haven't used it because  
this box is the only one in the house with PCI-Express.  It does 2D and  
regular 3D just fine, but that "dying after 5 minutes of HDR" thing gets  
to me.