My PC specs are:

Athlon 64x2, 3800+ 2.0Ghz

Asus A8N-E Mobo

GTX 7800, 256MB

2GB DDR ram

Win XP pro sp2

Just recently the fan on my aging vga card died, so I replaced it with a Zalman VF-1000. At the beginning it seemed to be ok but just a week later I noticed that the temperatures of my motherboard and CPU were quite high. At this time of the year I usually get 38/40 on idle and 58/60 on full load from my cpu, but after installing the zalman now I get 47/49 on idle and 70/72 on full, actually my asus probe warned me after reaching 71 while playing dragonage, so I stopped it. I don't know if it would have gone even higher.

The old cooling case of the 7800 sucked air on the right side, funneled it through the heatsink and out of the pc case on the left. The vf-1000 has no casing, it simply blows hot air everywhere, and my pc fan takes it in and blows it on the cpu heatsink. At least this is what I think it is happening. I bought the vf 1000 because I read some good reviews on the net as a vga cooler unfortunately it is making everything else hotter.

Does anyone have any solution for this messed up situation? The pc is 5 years old and the temps have always been stable within the margins I mentioned above, only after installing the zalman the temps started to go up. What can I do?

Well, considering that I'm not going to overclock the CPU and will not do Crossfire/SLI as I'll only buy one VGA card, it seems that the Phenom II X4 (or maybe even the X6, maybe) is better for me. I can put more money into my graphic card.

Are all Phenom II X4 the same or are there different models with different specs i.e total cache, L3cache and so on?

Thank you for the advice.

Thank you for the input.

So it seems that i7 920 is a little bit better than Phenom II, but will not really improve gaming performance by much, so spending the extra money will be kind of pointless.

I also would like to know if Phenom II only goes up to X4 or even higher cores, and if that would be much better?

One thing I did not mention, is that I'll buy the PC in about 6 months. Will Phenom or even i7 by then still be very good CPUs? I know that AMD Fusion is coming out next year but probably will cost a fortune.

I am in the process of choosing parts for a new PC, but I'm still undecided on whether buying Intel or AMD. The machine will be used mostly for games and movies.

Intel i7 920 and AMD Phenom II X4 seem to be very popular nowdays although, I'm not really sure on the differences between the two. But what about other CPUs from Intel or AMD, there are so many to chose from (Intel core i5, i3 or older Athlon 5000+ and 6000 series. Athlon 64 FX series). I don't understand how to compare them, it's all very confusing. I'd appreciate some insight.

I am having some strange problems with the colour settings on my pc.
I've just installed win xp sp2 on a new hard drive and with it the nvidia drivers (182.50)
for my geforce 7700 card. The problem that I have and always had with the nvidia control
panel was finding the right settings for desktop work, films and games.

To watch films my software of choice for several years has been ZoomPlayer and with it I've
installed 2 sets of codec, xvid and Lazy man's MKV for matrioska files. To tweak games
colour settings I use Asus OSD

Despite trying for several days to tweak the nvidia control panel I could not find the right
settings for everything, sometimes the videos were too bright with white colour being washed
out or sometimes the contrast were too dark, or the games were too dark to play. While I was
in the middle of all this i noticed what appeared to be a second set of colour settings,
different from the ones from the nvidia control panel. The first time it happened it was
while playing a video with zooplayer, the screen went completely black. Now I have these two
colour setting co-existing in my pc and they seem to overlap each other with different
applications.

When I play a video file with windows mediaplayer it looks too brigth but with zoomplayer it
looks darker, the exact same video file.
With games it is even stranger, as the game (Fallout 3) starts to load it has a brighter
setting but as soon as I click on it eveything changes as if a different setting had become
active and the screen becomes darker and therefore I use Asus OSD to compensate but as you
can imagine the result is a bit of a mess with gamma and contrast too high just to be able
to see.

What I don't understand is why there are two different settings active on my pc, one has to
be from the nvidia control panel, but where is the other one from? Could it be zoomplayer?
Another problem with zoomplayer, which I do not know if it is related, is that quite often
while I play MKV (matrioska) files Zoom crashes.

I'm not sure on what to do, everything looks pretty bad and it hurts my eyes, I'm looking
for some help to deal with this headache

come on you idiots get your thumbs out of your asses and answer me:evil:

After uninstalling Left 4 Dead I then restarted my pc and when the desktop came back all of the lettering was in bold including the start menu, the clock and all the words on my desktop. i tried to find some way to change the setting of my VGA but to no avail. I then re-installed Left 4 Dead, restarted the pc and everything was back to normal. Now I would like to remove the game without having the same problem. If it happens again what can do to fix it?

My pc is AMD 3800+ RAM 2G, VGA geforce 7700 256 mb, win xp, sp1

thank

I have just bought a webcam from Intopic (just a small company in Taiwan with made in china products) but after installing the drivers I get the following error message:

error 80040275 cannot find vidcap to filtergraph

I am therefore unable to use the webcam. I have tried to download other driver from their website but i still get the same error.

My pc is : athlon 64 3800+ dual core, 2GRam under winxp sp1.

Any suggestions?