[vox-tech] looking for a new video card

[Dylan Beaudette]

Hi,

I had been hearing an annoying hum from my machine for a couple days now, and 
took it apart this morning to find the fan on the video card buzzing in 
place. Cycling the power resulted in a brief attempt at turning on, and then 
the system shut off- as if there were an excessive power draw / powersupply 
failure. 

Unpluggin the offending fan on the video card resulting in a normal power-on, 
although now the video card is running hot. The card is :

nVidia Corporation NV31 [GeForce FX 5600XT] (rev a1)

I would like to stick to nVidia, as the accelerated hardware is fairly well 
supported. Ideally a card without fan would be nice.

An alternative would be to replace the fan on the video card. Does anyone have 
experience in something like this? There are some resources on the internet, 
but I thought I would also ask here.

Finally, is there any potential for melt-down if I operate this video card 
without a fan?

Thanks!

Dylan




-- 
Dylan Beaudette
Soil Resource Laboratory
http://casoilresource.lawr.ucdavis.edu/
University of California at Davis
530.754.7341