My NVIDIA 8800GT has been running very hot especially when playing games. It is not uncommon to see temperatures of 90 degrees C.
So I decided to buy
Zalman VF900-Cu Copper VGA Video Card Cooler. I spent a couple of hours installing it yesterday. Everything was going well until I got to the point where I needed to put it back into the motherboard.
What happened is that the PCIe slot where the video card fits is right under an unused PCI slot that is too hight for the new cooler to fit. What happens is a small piece of the unused PCI slot is in the way. I wrestled with it for almost an hour and couldn't get it to work. I looked online to see if it was possible to remove it and pretty much everyone said that I shouldn't even think about it. I'm at the point where I don't really care about my desktop much, so I got a pair of pliers and took a chunk off of the plastic of the PCI slot. I know I know, this was probably a dumb move, but I was just so fed up wit the whole installation that I had to do it.
The second problem was that I could not find a 3-pin connector for the fan so I had to order a 4pin to 3pin adapter.
My two questions are:
1- Did I ruin the motherboard by messing with the PCI slot?
2- What are the risks of trying to turn on the computer without the video card fan being connected to power? The whole installation is a huge heat sink as well, so I'm assuming it won't blow up for a while maybe?
