[GentleKiller]

#1: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6814130337

#2: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6814130325

#3: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6814143119

EVGA or BFG because low chance of defective, excellent price, but most of all, best customer/RMA service. EVGA typically gets your rebate check back to you within 2 weeks, by far the fastest I've seen in the industry graphics or otherwise.

Edit: Remember the 8800GTS512 runs hotter than the 8800GT. Quite a bit hotter, in fact, around 65-70C idle as I recall.

Ordered the #1 choice above.

Thank you

thats the exact the same card i have, what a great value. bighotdog, my idle temps are 48-50 via rivatuner and speedfan :oops:

[BigSilverHotdog]

I think my reference is because its my mate here who has 2 in SLI on a EVGA 780i board and they're pretty close. Good case airflow doesn't help when its hard for them to draw air. Plus, he runs the fans very, very low when he idles using rivatuner to customize it to minimum. I have a pic of his case innards I took when I was done building it:

http://imageupload.com/out.php/i118225_TTinside.jpg

(save to comp and rotate right for better angle I'm in too much of a rush right now to fix it myself)

If you look closely you will notice the fan airflow is counterproductive but it was how he wanted it.

And yes, it's an excellent card.

[nearmiss]

I've been too busy to do much of anything last 10 days.

Installed the Vista Ultimate 64Bit version to my system (described above).

Everything seems to work fine as far as the system is concerned. I did a dual boot config with Win XP Pro.

I've given alot of thought to this thing about using XP or Vista. It seems to me that Vista is the better way to go for more than a few reasons, with some complications of course.

Vista 64 bit is supposed to be a quantum leap above the XP 64Bit and certainly the XP 32 bit. My XP appears to recognize 3.25 GIG of my 4 gig ram, which is probably pretty good from what I've read.

3DMark03 is around 40,000+-, in either XP or VIsta. I haven't done much tweaking the overclock thing, except for memory to 1:1, processor to 3.2, and set my ram latency where it is recommended.

The 32bit is not supposed to be the best go for the new and upcoming multi-core processors. Therefore it would make sense to try to work through Vista issues. Currently, I understand there are few if any games competent to really use the power of Vista, the multicore processors or DX10.

Yet, looking ahead it is certain the future is multi-core and an advance OS like Vista 64Bit.

We should probably have a sticky thread devoted to Vista installations. Afterall, the SP1 has been released and MSFT has reduced the price of it. IN other words, maybe it's time to move onward and upward.

I've been poking around on the web looking for information on the Vista applied to gaming, and I've read some pretty interesting stuff. Vista is more tedious it would appear, since compatability does seem to be an issue for some games.

[BigSilverHotdog]

For most games. You have to remember, some of us still play games that came out 5, 10, 15 years ago. Vista is not the OS for those games, and isn't for many of the newer ones, either. Glad to hear you are doing well with your install. ~S~