Would better video card make a diff?

If it's a couple of years old, I'd stick with the 9800GT. It will give you excellent performance in SL.

Ty 170 is a bit more reasonable. I am not being cheap here really. Machines have a habit of frying every three years for me. This one is 2. Whatever I do have to look at it as a holding action for 1 year till the beast blows up

As for performance. I stand on a sky platform and build. Long as I can do that I don't need huge performance. I pull about 60 FPS on my 1950's but I basically have all the fancy crap shut off and my draw distance as low as it goes. (only dialed back things when the cards started complaining to me with the flash/beep phenomena).

If I look at DanielRavenNest's heirarchy chart, the 8600 GT sure isn't very high. I know it will still be better than what I've got, though.

Edit: well I see that the 40 buck one is DDR3.

It has GDDR3, which is faster than DDR3.

If any of those laptops used an nVidia 8400M or 8600M GPU, this would explain the laptop deaths: http://www.engadget.com/2008/07/10/all-nvidia-8400m-8600m-chips-faulty/3

I have a laptop with the 8600M-GS GPU, and it experienced sudden death right about this time last year. Fortunately it was still under warranty, so I got it repaired. They replaced the motherboard which, I'm hoping, has a newer (as in, manufactured after that problem was discovered and fixed) 8600M-GS on it. But I'm not taking any chances.

I found that, while playing SL, my GPU core temperature will quickly approach, and start hovering, around 80C. I don't know what the maximum core temperature is supposed to be, but I get really nervous when it creeps past 80. Just recently, however, I finally invested in one of those "chill pads" - platforms with little fans built in, that you set your laptop on. The effect was immediate and far better than I expected: Now when running SL, my GPU core stays between 68C and 74C!

If you want to play SL on your laptop, I strongly suggest getting one of those chill pads!

80 degrees C is not too bad.......not good either, but your card should be good at that temp. Above 90 is, in my mind, dangerous...........but I read somewhere that most nVidia cards are good up to about 105. I ain't testing that though.

Cool pads are a must with laptops.

On the 8600, 8800, 9500, and 9800 cards. You'll see a difference in the 8800 and 9800 over the 8600 and 9500...........for the better. Of the four the 9500 will run the coolest, the 9800 second coolest, 8600 second to the hottest and that 8800 will run the hottest.......common average temp when taxed like SL will tax it is about 80 to 85 C. All four cards require a minimum power supply rating of 450 watts.

The problem with running SL on a laptop is the Heat.

You have all those components in a small space, with just 1 small vent area. Eventually it'll cook itself.

I know.

I replace these things for a living. #1 thing? Fried video. #2- dropped laptops.

I want to get one of these. I am reading conflicting reviews of the ones with fans versus the ones filled with magic goo. Does anybody have any recommendations? It's for a 17" that sucks air in through the bottom and out through the back.

I have one of those laptops. I don't know anything about the ones filled with magic goo (the concept sounds rather iffy to me), but the fan-based one I have works some serious wonders!

I have one with magic goo. It's called Therma Pad. It cost around $40. It doesn't work. Period. There's really nothing else to say. The laptop gets just as hot as it ever did. Finally, after using the therma pad with the goo, for about 3 months now, the laptop finally fried. It was under warranty and just got back from getting a new motherboard. I'll be using a regular cooler with fans, but mostly, I won't be running SL on the laptop.

The theory isn't good...the goo works by absorbing surface heat and holding it in the pad. Fans work by increasing airflow both into and across the laptop, and carrying the heat away.

The cooler pad with a fan I bought made absolutely no difference to the temperature of my Macbook Pro.

Fans it is then. Thanks for the advice, folks

And if you can- keep the back of the laptop raised up to increase the circulation of air under it.

Haha, you are so funny!

Do you really think we would still have machines with 7000 series cards if we could afford that, plus the cost of a new power supply?

Hmmm... wanna be my sugar daddy?

I just had my machine overhauled in the past week, so my apologies for dragging this one up again.

What I got was an nVIDIA 9800GT and I also upgraded to a Core2 Quad Q9400 CPU with extra RAM of 3GB (I don't understand this '3GB' because I got two 2GB cards). I also replaced the motherboard with an Intel P55 and did a complete reinstall of Windows XP. Just to be on the safe side, I upgraded the graphics driver to the latest I could find for the 9000 series from nVidia, which is 191.07.

I also have two Philips 220CW monitors, independently configured in a dualview arrangement.

My PC crashes after running SL for little more than a minute now. I ran the nTune stability test and that crashes when I test the GPU or the PCI - even when I run the system with only one monitor.

Is the card a dud or does anyone have another idea why this might be?

First issue...XP can only address a bit over 3 GB since it is a 32-bit OS. With your hardware, I would suggest looking into running Windows 7 64 Bit for improved stability and to get the full potential from your hardware. You can get a trial version at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/cc442495.aspx?ITPID=wtcfeed if you want to test it.

It is sounding like your video card is bad. If you can get your hands on another card and switch them out, that would confirm it (if you got it from a shop that does repair, they probably have another sitting around that they can test..if not, just return it...if a known good card crashes, it's probably the motherboard).

That's actually a limitation of the hardware, and the exact limit depends on the motherboard and memory controller. Also, originally Windows XP could address all the way to 4GB using PAE. Microsoft disabled the use of PAE to address memory mapped by the motherboard for I/O in one of the XP service packs.

Windows Server 2003 can (depending on the version) address up to 128GB of RAM using PAE.

32-bit Linux (I believe starting with the 2.6 kernel) can address over 4GB using PAE.

Thanks for that, Veritable. I just wonder would installing Windows 7 be likely to raise hackles the way Vista did a couple of years back? I should say that I never tried Vista myself, being something of a digital Luddite, but I read enough bad press and heard enough harsh language regarding Vista to make me wary of a new Microsoft OS.


Just to be on the safe side, I'll take a look at these options first.


Any suggestions what configuration of motherboard and memory would circumvent the problem if I were to stick with Windows XP?

You are correct...it's a Windows 32 bit limitation. Other OS's can handle more with 32-bit.

Not sure if there is a hardware limit: the P55 chipset is a socket 1156 motherboard, capable of up to 16GB. The Q9400 CPU is socket 775. If the listed hardware is correct, I think I found your problem...

Windows 7 seems to be working well so far...I have not read any reports of problems like there were around the Vista launch, and i know many people running it. The Win7 driver structure is close to Vista's, soi there is not a radical shift like there was in the Vista/XP transition. There was also a longer window for the RTM to go to vendors, so they have had more time to test compatibility.

You can't circumvent this with 32-bit Windows XP. You need an x64 version of Windows.

You can't circumvent the problem unless you're using a horribly unpatched version of XP (or you want to see if you can get a copy of Server 2003 and hack DirectX support into it... or ask the devil Vista into your life). Why they nerfed XP, I don't know... Microsoft is worse about that than Linden Lab even.

[insert flame about "the ribbon"]

I think you just need to check reviews and the like, to see which boards will let you have 3.2G or 3.4G. You're unlikely to get more than an extra 400 MB out of it, because they need a big chunk of address space for your video card.

I believe it was because device drivers weren't playing nice with PAE.

And it wouldn't have had anything to do with giving people a reason to switch to Vista...

Bah. I shun your logical answer! Shun! Shun!