Looking to downgrade graphics card.

Tom Ato

Tom Ato

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I currently have a 8800GTS card and was hoping to get something smaller, mainly to reduce the heat output. Summer's coming up and I can't run my computer during the day because it heats the room too much (nice during winter though).

Anyways I was wondering if there was a comparable card for cheap and if there is any market for used graphics cards?

I don't play many PC games and if I ever do running things on "medium" would be just fine for me.
 
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This is the craziest thing I have heard in awhile.... Buy yourself a portable air conditioner or a fan. A graphics card shouldn't make to much of a difference, let alone heat your room in the winter?
 
I understand where you're coming from. My room gets extremely hot in the summer with my PC on. The a/c doesn't reach my room well, I can't use a window unit in my neighborhood, and floor units don't work well. I would never downgrade though you crazy ass!
 
Your video card by itself shouldn't be generating that much heat that it turns your room from sweltering nightmare to intolerable sweltering nightmare. If it is, then something's probably wrong. Computer's getting poor air circulation, one of the computer vents is clogged, the entire thing's insides are completely dust covered, and so on. Best Idea would be to open the thing up, get some compressed air, and clean it out nice and good.
 
....I can haz old veedocawrd?


The one in my main rig is also a 8800GTS and sly sounds like fun.

but I have a couple crappy... err.. "cooler" cards just laying around. I can trade ya!
 
[quote name='Lice']This is the craziest thing I have heard in awhile.... Buy yourself a portable air conditioner or a fan. A graphics card shouldn't make to much of a difference, let alone heat your room in the winter?[/quote]

My machine has decent circulation and an 8600 GT. The temp gauge says that while running WoW on MEDIUM settings, it's blowing out 140-150F air. Play at that temp for a few hours and that's more than enough to heat the hell out of a room. I never noticed when I lived in my apartment because I played in the spacious living room, but now that I've moved everything into a little 12x12' room? Dear lawd, even at night...
 
If you can still find one, I highly suggest you get a 7600 GT. I don't know the rest of your specs, but my old 7600 GT could run most games on COD4/TF2/CoH/HL2/CSS and so on with High settings.

I will trade it to you for your 8800GTS. :]
 
I was just hoping for something newer that was comparable, but it sounds like that's a no. It gets to triple digit heat out where I live and the electricity bill gets to well over $300 a month so adding more fans or a/c does sort of defeat the purpose.
 
[quote name='Tom Ato']I was just hoping for something newer that was comparable, but it sounds like that's a no. It gets to triple digit heat out where I live and the electricity bill gets to well over $300 a month so adding more fans or a/c does sort of defeat the purpose.[/quote]

Hey, don't know where your from but last summer in NYC during the June heatwave I had the same hesitations with my own computer; should I get larger fans, watercooling, etc. In the end I decided to turn up my case fans and was able to run my computer in a room of ~90 degrees with no issues.

If anything component were to have failure due to heat, your HDD's would be the first to go but I don't see that happening. If you still want to trade I have a 8600gts 256mb...
 
The A/C doesn't reach my room well either, a small vent for the cold air to come, but I use a long fan about 3-4 ft high and just have it blow in cool air from the living room(setting it outside of the door and have it blow the air into my room). I have a 8800GTS also and been doing this for couple of years now. Although it doesn't heat up my room that much.
 
forget all the people telling you to cool your components down differently or blow the air around more or whatever... no... all that does is change where the heat is. for less heat you've got to use less power. conservation of energy. energy is going to only go from one form to another -- in the case of a computer, it's all thermal (the kinetic energy of the air molecules).. except for a neglible portion going to sound (which eventually turns into thermal).

if you want a computer that dumps less heat into its surroundings, the only way to do it is with components that use less power (power is energy per second -- a watt is a joule per second). if you run a 300 watt computer for 10 seconds, that's 3 kilojoules of thermal energy.. there's no way to avoid it. it doesn't matter whether you cool it well or use watercooling or whatever, that only affects where the thermal energy is, you're still stuck with it in your house.

there are other ways to control the temperature of your room, but the only way to have your computer dissipate less heat is to have it consume less energy. no exceptions.
 
Have you heard of portable A/C's?

It is a tube fitting that goes between the window and the window frame, the tube extends to the A/C unit which is on wheels and can be moved around the room.

portable-air-conditioner-window.jpg
 
Can't you just underclock the video card?

I'm not totally familiar with nVidia cards, so I'm not sure what program to use.
With my ATI card, I set it to reduce the clock speed and memory speed when I'm not running any 3D applications to keeps temps (and fan noise) down.
 
I will trade you, I have an MSI ATI Radeon 4670 that is 3 months old. Lots less heat and power but still game
 
[quote name='seen']Have you heard of portable A/C's?

It is a tube fitting that goes between the window and the window frame, the tube extends to the A/C unit which is on wheels and can be moved around the room.

portable-air-conditioner-window.jpg
[/quote]

wouldn't something like that cause an electric bill to go up fast? or do they not have much effect?
 
You could always throw a Zalman on it. Usually you'll get at least a 10 degree drop for both idle and load temperatures.

[quote name='MrDubbs']wouldn't something like that cause an electric bill to go up fast? or do they not have much effect?[/quote]

Same thing as a wall mounted AC. Watch your bill go up in no time.
 
[quote name='MrDubbs']wouldn't something like that cause an electric bill to go up fast? or do they not have much effect?[/quote]

I don't know the exact numbers, but from what I've heard, they're pretty inefficient.

OP, you might want to try looking at other things to bring down the temperature in your room.
Thicker curtains or blinds can help out quite a bit, by reducing the amount of direct sunlight getting into the room (it helps more than you'd think).

Also, try turning off more electronics when you're not using them. Set your computer to go to sleep after 15 minutes of inactivity.
I spent a very brief time with some roommates who left the TV, PS2, XBOX, and 4 computers running 24/7 and they complained about how hot the apartment was and how high the electric bills were.
You might also want to switch off your surge-protectors if you won't be using anything for a while because a lot of devices still put off some heat in standby mode.

I'm not trying to lecture anyone, just offering some advice from my experience of living in my own sweat-box.
 
Well OP, I read through this thread and didn't see the best suggestions.

I'd doubt your graphics card would be using noticeably more energy compared to any other card during normal desktop use. The only time it should really consume more energy is when the GPU has to process more intensive stuff such as 3D rendering / gaming.

Anyways, you might want to look into getting a more efficient power supply for your pc. Look for one of those 80%+ efficient or one of those 'silent' type power supplies. If you've got a cheap chinese psu right now, 60 to 70% of the energy it's using might be actually going to use in the components inside your pc. With an 80%+ psu, 80% of the energy pulled from the psu goes to use in the pc.

Secondly, I don't know what kind of monitor you have, but if it's one of those old CRT monitors, you'll want to replace that with an LCD. Again the CRT uses more energy than an LCD, thus generating more heat.

Next, you'll want to be sure your room can cool off once the sun goes down. Check your lighting. If you're using something like one of those standup halogen floodlamps, they use a little 500w bulb. I think most ceiling fans have 4 light bulb sockets in them. If you're using standard 60w incandescent bulbs, that's 240w being used there, with about 220w or so doing nothing but generating heat. Try to replace those bulbs with the compact fluorescent kind. The CFL's use 15w instead of 60w but put out about the same amount of light.

Now I noticed someone here said that the a/c vent in their room didn't really work too well. I had the same problem back when I was living with my parents. Apparently when they bought the house they complained that there wasn't enough a/c going to their bedroom. So the builder changed something with the venting. Now when the thermostat is set to 80 degrees, my room and my brothers rooms 'cools' off to about 84 while my parents room was nearly 75 degrees.

My suggestion to that is to try and build one of those "ghetto a/c" units. Basically you wrap some copper tubing around a fan, and then fill an ice chest with water and frozen water bottles. Then you use a pump to pump the cold water through the tubing around the fan. I haven't built one of these myself but I plan on doing it, and it seems like it would be a great supplement to a hot room.
 
I don't run things when I'm not using them. I even went so far as to buy a Kill-a-watt to measure power consumption when I'm both using things and not (my toaster always drew power, cost about $2 a year, now unplugged).

The whole point was to reduce heat and power consumption to begin with, so buying a new A/C or just cranking it up isn't really an option.

I guess what I was really looking for was a "magic" graphics card that does pretty much the same as my 8800GTS, but wasn't as hot. I figured it's been a few years since I built my computer and was hoping something newer has come out. What about upcoming cards? Anything "magical" on the horizon?
 
You won't see any magic, but you will see an improvement by moving to the 9000 series. They are similar to the 8000 series but smaller with better power ratings. Basically, power consumption = heat generation. The 8800GTS uses about 168 W idle and 250 W full load (depending on how much RAM your card has). Moving to a 9600GT should get you down to 120W/197W, with relatively similar performance.

All the information for this is on Tom's Hardware. Just try and find the newest card with the lowest power consumption and that should cut down on the heat some.
 
You should also keep in mind most of the new boards are made to take the abuse. It would take about ~127°C before any permanent damage happened to the card. You'd have to basically take off the heat sink and fan for that to really happen.

My old 7900 GT had to deal with 100 degree Summers before I upgraded to a 9800 GTX. It didn't have any trouble running back when I played Oblivion on Max settings. I really doubt your 8800 GTS is going to eat it from running games at Mid settings.
 
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