386SX wrote:Tetrium wrote:386SX wrote:Is the viper 2 card a card safe to use for a everyday pc or it usually overheat or as read somewhere here they will not last long as other savage 2k? And what about the on board jumpers to set agp4x, must they be all closed or i risk to fry it?
i have an athlon 1000 and i an deciding what card to use as time correct but still alternative configuration.
I don't know first hand if Viper 2 had thermal problems, but in case this is something you worry about, consider modding a fan to it's heatsink in a similar fashion Brostenen did to his V3 3500 in this thread Athlon-XP V3-3500 Build 😀
😀 from my test it become quiet hot after a while, being not a common easy to find card,i was worried to use it everyday like the rage fury maxx.
This card was made by Diamond. I've used a Viper 550 (TNT) for years and a friend of mine used a Viper 770 (TNT2) for years also. Both were passively cooled and seemed to at least not have too much serious thermal issues.
But about your worry about frying your Viper 2: If you rig a fan to the heatsink like in the link I provided (you could also opt to use better case ventilation if you prefer that over rigging active cooling on your old graphics cards) then you should be home free, so to say 😜
And the way Brostenen rigged his Voodoo 3 is actually quite popular here on Vogons, for several for good reasons:
-It's cheap
-It doesn't damage the card (no damaging the original heatsink...if you care about that 😜 but lots of people prefer to not ruin the original heatsink, including me)
-It's very fast and very easy to do, only need some wires and at least some common sense
-Most important is...it works! 😁 I modded my GF6800 (Vanilla Edition) the same way, only had to remove it's original fan assembly
So I can highly recommend it 😉 Only thing that could go wrong I think is if you have some accident while rigging the fan, like ESD damage for instance.