Recent content by UncleMacro

When it says that it's a 1.5 volt AGP slot they're talking about the signaling voltage. It has nothing to do with the auxiliary power connector. All modern AGP motherboards are 1.5 volts only so you've got a standard board in that respect. X800s are compatible with 1.5 volt AGP slots. I've never...

Both the X700 and X700 Pro are almost always slower than your 9800 Pro was due to their limited memory bandwidth. Check here for comparisons. GeForce 6600GTs are consistently faster than a 9800 Pro and go for around $130 and up. 6600GTs are quicker than 9800 Pros (as shown here) but they're not...

That sounds more like a driver problem than hardware. You could try the old "uninstall your drivers, run DriverCleaner, reinstall the latest drivers" drill to see if it makes any difference. But given that your screen's going black I'd still try slowing down your AGP port to 4X using SMARTGART...

It could be lots of things including hardware problems. It could be power supply problems in which case you should check your voltages and make sure it can deliver enough current (especially for 12 volts). It could also be AGP instability in which case you should slow down your AGP port and try...

The 6800 is the better of the two. Check here for a technical comparison and here for game benchmarks. The 6600GT has a 500MHz GPU with 8 pipes and the 6800 has a 325MHz GPU with 12 pipes which puts them very close together in pixel shader speed. But the memory bandwidth on the 6600GT is...

1) Go to the NVIDIA control panel. You can get to it by opening the Windows Control Panel, double-click Display, select the Settings tab, click Advanced, then select the NVIDIA tab. 2) Go to the "Color Correction" page. 3) Set "Apply color changes to:" to "All". 4) Set "Color Profile:" to...

Look... It's 99.9% sure that the Vantec stuff is non-conductive/non-capacitive in which case you can smear it wherever you'd like. I'd still try to keep it only on the GPU because goo can collect dust and that looks ugly. But if you must be absolutely 100% sure then just get yourself a lifetime...

If that grease contained silver then they'd be trumpeting it as a big feature on the tube's label. It's probably just standard silicone grease or something like that. That stuff should be just fine. If it's good enough for a CPU then it's good enough for your GPU. Go ahead and use it.

The truth is that there's not a very large difference in thermal conductivity between various pastes in carefully run tests. There's an entertaining article on the subject here. You just want to avoid crappy goop which dries out. I seem to recall that the top of my GPU was pretty large when I...

AS5 is only a little conductive but it's also capacitive and that's trouble if you get it on the high-speed pins of any of the chips. It's okay to use it if you're very careful not to get it anywhere but on the top of the GPU but if you've got some other paste I'd use it instead. Only the silver...

The only time I've seen SMARTGART refuse to load is when there was a problem with the display driver installation. I'd uninstall the Omegas and then run the ATI uninstaller to make sure that all your ATI stuff is cleaned out. Then try downloading the stock drivers from ATI and installing them...

A 6600GT is a 500MHz GPU with 8 pixel pipes and 3 vertex pipes and it has 16GB/sec memory bandwidth. An x800 is a 392MHz GPU with 12 pixel pipes and 6 vertex pipes and it has 22.4 GB/sec memory bandwidth. There's a head-to-head comparison of the two cards here. The x800 usually beats the 6600GT...

BF2 doesn't support Radeon 9200s and it doesn't exactly exit in a graceful fashion. Lot's of people are complaining about it on various forums so maybe EA will allow it to run at some point. BF2 will run on 8500s and 9200s are just cut-down versions of 8500s so it should be able to work if a bit...

You can raise the AGP voltage to try to fix an unstable AGP port. Sometimes raising the voltage will stop data corruption. If you're not having any problems with your video card then it's best to just leave it at the standard value of 1.5 volts.

Make sure you get the 256MB version of the 9250. The 256MB version has 128 bit video RAM whereas the 128MB versions have 64 bit RAM (which of course sucks!). This is an example of the good one.