My WinXP machine suddenly starting displaying random patterns of video garbage Saturday, which I figured was the sure sign of a crapped out video card. Weird, since I haven't had a video card go bad since the Vesa Local Bus days. The computer must have known I was passing by Fry's that day.
Rather than buy a new card, I grabbed an extra one out of the closet (don't ask). The card that fried was an NVidia 5700 Ultra, and I replaced it with an ATI Radeon 9600 Pro. In benchmarks, the Radeon is more powerful than the 5700, but check out how much heatsink is required to passively (and silently) cool these things:
The NVidia is on the left and the Radeon is on the right. The GPU on the Radeon is physically about a quarter the size of the NVidia GPU and doesn't require an extra power connector. My motherboard temperature dropped nearly 3 degrees since I installed that card. (Yep, that's a Zalman heat pipe system on the NVidia card.)
For some reason, I can't see the machine POST when the card is connected to my Apple Cinema 20" monitor. That kinda sucks, so I'll need to figure out what's going on with that.
