Mr Alpha VS GeForce 8800GTX

I actually treated myself to a 8800GTX. Getting it installed turned into a bloody clash of titans.

I was worried that it wouldn't fit in my Antec P180 case. The card is huge; 27.9 cm to be exact. Taking it out of the box the first time was an awe inspiring experience. Turns out if fits! Had to reroute some cable, but it fit. Barely.

Seeing this as an good omen I shut down the computer. Then I remembered I might want to uninstall the old drivers first to make this switch as painless as possible. So I booted the machine back up, and it gave me a black screen instead of the welcome screen. Telling myself it was just a bad mistake I restart the computer hoping for everything to start as it should. No such luck. Restart again, this time to safe mode. In safe mode I uninstall the graphics drivers. Lo and behold, the machine now booted properly.

With that heart wrenching moment out of the way I set myself to mounting the new graphics card in the case. It won't fit! But it just did and I can't figure out what is wrong now. After some head-into-wall-pounding, world-in-general-cursing and other standard troubleshooting techniques I noticed that my northbridge heatsink was in the way. The motherboard (ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe) orginally came with a deceptively small, but loud fan, which I had replaced with a Zalman northbridge heatsink. Some of the northbridge pins got in the way of the 8800GTX HSF. When I first checked the fit I hadn't actually tried to mount the card.

"I can fix this, I can fix this", I kept telling myself. If I break of a few pins and bend away a few others this should work. Just to prove the world was against me the northbridge heatsink was attached with plastic clips you had to remove the motherboard to get to. I wasn't going to let that stop me. Digging up some tools of destruction from my toolbox I set about doing some open computer surgery. I do not recommend trying to rip things loose from a heatsink while it is still mounted in the computer. You can easily damage the motherboard. But I have never been good at heading my own advice, so I set about demolishing the heatsink while it still was mounted. Partially destroyed heatsinks can be really sharp, let me tell you. Soon I was bleeding all over the place. Band-aid to the rescue!

When I had gotten the card into the computer it was time to boot up. Everything worked fine. (Had you there for a sec, didn't I?) Of to nVIDIA's site to get the latest drivers. After a few more reboots I was of to play System Shock 2.