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Just an FYI, picked up the best buy deal BFG 8800GT OC and it works fine in the ideq in sig. Probably the last upgrade for the system unless I find a smoking deal on 2gb of DDR ram and/or a 4800+ x2 939 processor. The 3800+ in it runs at 2.4ghz pretty easily with no heat problems, so I may not bother, though some games are starting to make 1gb seem puny. I built the thing over 2 years ago so I got some pretty darn good mileage out of it, and I did it on a decent budget (~1k total) and this is the first upgrade I've had to make. I've only been running on a 1280x1024 lcd and 720p projector, so it doesn't need to have a whole lot of muscle, but the vid card was finally showing it's age.
I was worried it wouldn't have the juice to power the card as it draws a full 30W more than the old card (80W vs 110W), but no problems. I had to get a bit creative with the pci-e power connector as it required two IDE drive power inputs (and the ideq only has 2 total), so I had to Y both of the ideq's drive connectors to power both the drives and the card. The heatsink actually touches some caps on the board near the end of the card (this sucker is pretty long), so I put some electrical tape on the surface so they wouldn't short and no problems. The fan on the card is a bit loud, but oh well, I guess it's the price you pay for a high performance single slot card. Hopefully it'll hold me over for another 2 years with just some more RAM before I need to build something new.
I was worried it wouldn't have the juice to power the card as it draws a full 30W more than the old card (80W vs 110W), but no problems. I had to get a bit creative with the pci-e power connector as it required two IDE drive power inputs (and the ideq only has 2 total), so I had to Y both of the ideq's drive connectors to power both the drives and the card. The heatsink actually touches some caps on the board near the end of the card (this sucker is pretty long), so I put some electrical tape on the surface so they wouldn't short and no problems. The fan on the card is a bit loud, but oh well, I guess it's the price you pay for a high performance single slot card. Hopefully it'll hold me over for another 2 years with just some more RAM before I need to build something new.