Video Cards Installation Pictures

WARNING: IF YOU AREN'T A COMPUTER GEEK, YOU PROBABLY SHOULDN'T READ THIS POST.

Ok, I warned you. Now, here's a few pictures I took while installing my new video cards.

I had to take my motherboard out of my cases to install my new CPU heatsink, so I figured I'd snap a few photos while it was out of the case. I've got many heatpipes now.

This is my new CPU heatsink. I had to mount a 120mm fan on top of it myself, but mounting was easy since it came with clips for the fan. As a reference, the fan is about as thick as a quarter.

Here's a close up of the Fanless Design heatsink on my ASUS A8N-SLI Premium motherboard. You can sorta see the heat pipe going underneath my video card towards another heatsink on my motherboard. I didn't install the heatsink or the heat pipe on my motherboard; the motherboard came with it.

I also installed seven new blue LED case fans on my tower. I had to bust out my power drill for the two fans in the front of my case because I had to put some screws through plastic. The other fans just clipped right in.

Blue is my favorite color.

So these new video cards are SCREAMING fast. Plus the idle and load temperatures of my two cards went down 20 degrees C from my previous video cards. Idle is now 47 degrees C on the second card and about 57 degrees C while I'm playing a game. Now that Oblivion runs better on my PC at 1600x1200, everything on high and HDR on, I've been playing that quite a bit lately. Also, I can play Rocket Arena 4 at 1600x1200, Ultra Settings without a drop below 50 fps; I don't use AA because at 1600x1200 you don't even notice the aliasing really. I love the fps optimized maps that come with Rocket Arena 4. Raven Software needs to take some hints from the Rocket Arena 4 map makers. The maps that come with Quake 4 are far from fps optimized.