Re: changing the fan cooler on my video card

attilathehun1 wrote:
Ok, so your saying to buy the Zalman VF900-Cu VGA Cooler, or that's what you would do if you were me? Ok, I took off the stock cooler and fan and I have the bare card with the components and 4 RAM squares half way surrounding the CPU on the card. This is something new to me, I didn't know that graphic cards has CPUs. I guess it's on high-end cards. This Zalman comes with extra RAM, that's new to me too? Maybe I'm misreading this.

In summary, the Zalman page indicates that the VF900 fits. The VF900 sits
on top of the GPU (graphics processing unit). The package includes eight
small heatsinks, with sticky tape on the back, and you adhere those to
the RAM chips on the graphics card. It is not "extra RAM", it is heatsinks
for the RAM that is already on the graphics card. It is there to help
keep the RAM cool.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gpu

Ok, I'm buying RAM for my mobo/CPU. The motherboard is an Elitegroup and if I had to guess it's an AMD compatible board. Model GF6100-M754. It says to use un-buffered RAM. Do you know what the difference is with un-buffered or buffered? I don't want to buy more stuff for this PC and then find out later it's a mistake. I know there is something about a heat spreader or most RAM I see at newegg.com have no heat spreader. I'm also buying a video card for it and I want to make sure it's not an Intel supported card, like ATI. I need AMD compatible. The card is an Elitegroup model ECS N8400GS2-512DS GeForce 8400 GS 512MB 64-bit GDDR2 PCI Express 2.0 x16 HDCP Ready Video Card. Ok, this is getting too much of a message I think. Thanks, attilathehun1


Yes, I know what the difference is. There are two kinds of RAM commonly
available. Unbuffered is used by desktop motherboards. Registered RAM is
used by server boards. Registered RAM has a couple extra chips on it,
that connect to the address bus. On unbuffered RAM, the address bus
connects directly to all the memory chips, without an intermediary.

Since you know it takes unbuffered RAM, then you look for the word "unbuffered".

A heat spreader isn't absolutely essential. I have RAM with heat spreaders
and RAM without heat spreaders, and all the RAM works.

The board will use DDR memory, and if you look at the motherboard, it actually
has "DDR400" printed next to the RAM slots. The motherboard is single channel,
so the RAM sticks don't have to match. You could buy 2x512MB PC3200 if you
wanted a 1GB configuration, or you could buy a single 1GB PC3200 DDR400 DIMM.
If you get the RAM from Newegg, there likely won't be a problem with
whatever you buy.

The video card you've selected, is PCI Express, and will work with any
motherboard that has a PCI Express video card slot. Where brand matching
comes in, is if you're doing SLI (two cards) or Crossfire (two cards),
the software driver restricts where the cards will work, with respect
to the chipset on the motherboard. But you're buying just the one card
and using it by itself. In which case, it doesn't matter what kind
of motherboard it is plugged into.

Where occasionally there is a problem, is when a motherboard has a
partially wired PCI Express video slot. For example, some cheap
motherboards have a large (x16 sized) connector, but the wiring to
the connector is only x4. Only 25% of the wires are connected. There
have been cases where some video cards won't start, when the slot isn't
fully wired like that. But you get a hint, by reading the user manual
for the motherboard. If the motherboard ever contains a list of
"compatible video cards", that is an underhanded way of saying their
video card slot is not standard. If the motherboard manual doesn't
have a compatible list of video cards, then it should work with anything.
Sort of the opposite of what it looks like at face value. Finding a
list of compatible video cards, means their slot is not standard.
If something is standard, then you don't have to say anything about
it.

Paul
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Before I give up....
    ... I have an AGP FX5200 video card. ... Examine the motherboard for leaking capacitors. ... I use Knoppix (a Linux ...
    (alt.comp.hardware.pc-homebuilt)
  • Re: Master or Slave
    ... The washing machine man came to see our machine when it was on the blink and even he said it was the mobo on the washing machine. ... Acutally, I bought the RAM stick and the mobo was thrown in, that's the way I'm looking at it. ... When the video card has run out of RAM, it might need more room to ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.hardware)
  • Re: computer problem
    ... motherboard light is on so assuming it ... Now, carefully look at the contents of the PC case, is there a card poking ... out of the motherboard that might be a video card (monitor was connected ... stick of RAM, with the only card in place being the video card if you need ...
    (alt.os.windows-xp)
  • Re: Fault finding need advice
    ... I have a P5B motherboard with 4GB of RAM which dual boots with Vista and Ubuntu. ... I removed all drives and tried powering, and I took out the RAM sticks. ... When it was a board/GFX card and RAM the machine still would flash and powered off but on the GFX card on of the caps cought fire! ... Chips that use a power supply voltage directly, ...
    (alt.comp.hardware.pc-homebuilt)
  • Re: Blocking Issue: Hardware Conflict --Please Help!
    ... > XP claims there is a conflict between the motherboard and the video ... > video card. ... > I have tried removing the video card and using an old pci video card. ... > solve this problem so I can install XP? ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.hardware)
Loading