They rarely do make a difference, the best thing to do is buy an aftermarket fan from Zalman and slap it on the GPU.     You can keep the Antec fan under the GPU and get a Zalman vf900 and you will have a sick GPU cooler and something that will pull its hot air and push it out back. 

How many case fans do you have in that DELL?

9mmSpliff

Just the one it came with.  it 's in the front of the case, and pulls air in over the heat sink for the cpu. Also, does the after market fan involve removing the old fan (on the graphics card) and if so, doesn't that void my warranty?

Sorry to write so much. I just wanted to give all the facts. Please help me! ( I have also bold faced the important if you just want to skim) 

I bought  a Dell E510, which out of the box  came with an 80 gig hard drive, 1 gig of ram, a dual core 2,66ghz processor, and a 128mb x300se graphics card, and a 305 watt power supply, in August of last year. It served me faithfully for the first two months. ( Ihad never owned my own computer before.) In october, I pooled my birthday money and bought an x1950 pro. Oh, the differnces it made and still does. As testimony of its power, it most recently mustered 60+FPS on the demo ofTomb Raider: Anniversary, with all settings maxed and 16x Anti-aliasing.

But the real reason I am posting: Cooling and the sucky power supply.

Before purchasing the new card, I used an online power supply calculater, plugged in all the variables + the new card and cam up with 294. Hot Dog! Nary an overheating problem, nor has the block's power ever failed while powering my rig. However, a little game called STALKER came out. I bought it played it and enjoyed it...for 15 minutes. My card had overheated. Catalyst Control showed 79 degrees celcius! To hot, I guess for the x1950 that could. So I cracked open my rig and put my nightstand fan next to it. This seemed to help, so I decided that I needed more fans, for after the STALKER incident even Need For Speed Most Wanted was artifacting.

In Best Buy today, I picked up an Antec fan, that fits inside two expansion slots. It takes up 3.6 watts, so theoretically I am still in the clear. However, it doesn't appear to be doing anything. Is it supposed to be under my card? The blowing side of the fan is not facing the card, rather the sucking side is. Is this the way it is supposed to be? My card is facing up (not upside down as most mother boards require) and the fan is underneath it directly (no space between, at all), and as I said the blowing part is facing away from the card, not toward it.

Please help.

Thanks!

Shrodinger

I never really have trouble with games, even on the highest difficulties. One of the few times I ever had a problem with a game was when I played Ghost Recon. On the last level, I made a quick save, only to be mowec down with machine gun fire. So I had to retry about 30 times trying to get out of dying. ( No I didn't have any earlier saves, and I wasn't restarting the level. If you have ever played the original Ghost Recon, you'll know that the moscow level is KILLLER).

Like I said other than that no difficulties. The higher difficulty settings on FPSs just mean that you need to play hide and seek, and in the end, such tactics greatly improve your online gaming skillz.

______________

Half Life 1, Blue Shift, Opposing Force, They Hunger, Diablo 1,2,and the expansion, Starcraft, Warcraft (Zug! Zug!) Red Faction Ghost Recon, and its two expansions, Enemy Territory (FREE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!)

Seriously dude, get a new rig, or make one. Then you can play stuff like: Quake 4, Doom 3, Enemy territory: Quake Wars, Half Life 2, Cronicles Of Riddick, Unreal tournament 3, Crysis, and so on and so forth.

All of these games have great gameplay and great stories:

RPG:

The Elder Scrolls !V: Oblivion

Diablo 2

FPS:

Half life 2

STALKER

These games are just awesome:

Rainbow 6: Vegas

Unreal Tournament

Quake 4

Doom 3

Prey

Enjoy! :)

lost planet is a console port ...  and console ports have retarded graphics ... not all of them but lost planet is one of them

Lost planet's graphics rule. Full hdr, af16, and aa? Mmmm, boy! The particle effects and the motion blur, too are amazing. The explosions and smoke effects are hollywood quality. This game does not have retarded graphics.

[QUOTE="Shrodinger"]*sigh* emulators are illegal. I was going for "legal, free, and fun" with my post.ForlornHope

not if you own the game. 

Oh, come on! Its is still illegal! Sony, or Sega, or Nintendo is losing money on the system everytime some b00b downloads an emulater. Say Sonny Jim goes and gets a PS1 emulater, that right there is $50 Sony will never see. (I am not saying they need that $50, the gluttons... >.>, but it is theirs.)

as for bad company, calling it a decent substitute for battlefield 2 is like calling your right hand a decent substitute for jessica alba

ROFL. He was asking about the Battlefied 2: Modern Combat for 360, which was released shortly after Battlefield 2 on pc, not about Bad Company.

I would go Unreal Anthology. I already have all those games ( :P ) but the most bang for your buck will be found in any unreal server.

Also The 360 battlefield I chanced to play at my friends house, and it was okay. Pretty much the same as the pc version, but with teh crappy controller.