your notes on heat came in handy, just happens, i bought a xotac geforce 9600gt today, looking forward to testing it.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814500043
of course i'm not PCIe 2.0, only 1.0
want a 64GB SSD soon.
Stick with the Seagate Barracuda drives and those other high RPM SATA II/III drives. The SSDs still have a ways to go before they're usable for heavy use. After a couple million of writes the drive is toast. Reads are unlimited though. This is why the page file on many netbooks are disabled, simply due to this reason. All I need to do is load up one of my hard drive stressing programs (measures total drive throughput and speed capacity) and run it overnight, and I can pretty much guarantee you that the SSD would be just about toast, not to mention running very warm due to the heavy load on it.
May I also take note, right now, I'm working on a PC someone gave to me to fix up. It's an HP Pavilion m7667c. On this system, the wiring job is TERRIBLE (all the cables are clumped between the drives the CPU for power, the SATA cables are all over the place, one was bent at an angle greater than 90 degrees at the connector point which I fixed up after fighting the power cables, and of course, wires are all over the place. This is making cooling on this box very inefficient, especially since it only has a PSU fan, case fan, CPU fan and a GPU fan. When I ran a torture test on this PC, the processor at idle was at 32 Celsius on both cores, and the GPU (Geforce 7500 LE) was idling at 69 Celsius. When the test began, within a minute the GPU's core broken the 102 Celsius barrier, which is when I stopped torturing it. The CPU ran for a good 10 minutes before getting close to 60 Celsius. This is one thing I think HP really needs to improve on, as well as any other PC maker. Over the boiling point of water on a GPU's core in terms of temp is ridiculous, or should I say ludicrous. Now, I can improve the cooling on this, however I can't as the box is cramped as it is with PCI-PCI Press cards, cables all over the place and such, the box has poor cooling to the PCI cards, and I can't fit in any room for a better heatsink/fan for the card. I can apply some Arctic Silver that I use on my gaming PC, however I highly doubt that'll do much to the card considering it has a lack of cool air coming to it, and I'd probably wind up melting it anyways from the heat. The CPU, that's due to the power cables and poor air flow in the case.
When you're a gamer and you build your own PCs (many of the PCs in my home have been built by me, other than the hand-me-downs I've gotten), you'll know the importance of proper wire management (I run SATA cables on one side of the case, power on the other, and anything else at the bottom of the case keeping the middle free, bringing cables out of the "cluster" to connect things at their proper bend radius when needed, which leaves tons of room for cooling/expanding and minimal mess. Looks like the inside of a Mac Pro so to speak), proper cooling, what will work the best with what, and especially massive cases (none of that small crap!). I treat PC building as an artwork so to speak, and heck does it keep hardware going and lasting. My Gaming PC is only being cooled by fans, and it kicks the butt of just about every Pre-built PC I've seen even when overclocking.
But still, this HP PC which I'm fixing up at the moment is used as a DVR/Internet/Gaming machine for the family. It's on 24/7 and with temps like this even after I blew out the crapload of dust I found in the PC (mainly in the heatsinks) with an airgun hooked up to a 6 gallon air compressor (this does wonders!) and then ran Torture tests on it, I'm surprised I haven't seen any Thermal Shutdown errors in any of the logs and that the GeForce card isn't fried/artifacting yet.
). I built all my computers and I'm aware of cooling problems.