"I have an early 2008 Mac Pro that I've been installing various components into. Had a flashed eVGA 8800GT for a few months, but the fan on the card was driving me crazy; and when I saw your mention of the Accelero S1. Rev 2 cooler I decided to get one, along with an assortment of fans to go with it.

Installing it was easy enough, but finding a place to connect the fan was not; so I ended up just leaving it fanless and it's been running great, the entire computer runs cool.

Also; roughly two weeks ago I decided to bite the bullet and get a Velociraptor (300GB/10K RPM), after reading that it can be installed in Bay 2 by unscrewing the connector/stretching the cable. Worked like a charm... until last week when the hdd started making a slight high-pitched noise. Ended up RMA'ing it, and my replacement arrived yesterday which led to the next issue: Fitting two of them in the bays. By unscrewing all 4 connectors I managed to make both drives fit by using Bay 2/3, so I was able to transfer all my data over

With the 8800GT fanless (w/Accelero S1. Rev 2) I've never seen the HDD go above 25 degrees celcius; not even when taxing all 4 cores with a Handbrake encode.
(Actual hard drive temperature never exceeding 25°C? (That's almost typical ambient room temperature - 77°F) or is that HD Bay temperature?-Mike)
Ah, sorry, should have been more clear. Bay temp hasn't exceeded 25C, and the max I've seen the (Velociraptor) HDD S.M.A.R.T reading at is 27c, and that is when running two WoW clients at the same time. :)
(Even 27C seems low for a HD in use. I wish my 7K1000 (in G5 tower) ran that cool. (No problems with it regardless - drives typically rated for up to 60C max operating temp.)-Mike)
Yeah, it's pretty low. But I guess the "IcePack" heatsink does help.
-Richard O."

BTW - OWC wrote they're getting in some new model VelociRaptors in a few days with a connector location that aligns with the Mac Pro HD bays (no mods needed).

Fast, Reliable, FireWire 400 Plug & Play - that's what you get with the OWC Neptune 'Value Done Right' line of storage solutions. Great for Audio/Video, Music, Backup (Fully Dantz/EMC Backup Certified, Apple Time Machine Ready), Photography, general storage, and more. Fully bootable on any system that supports Firewire startup.
Everything you need & more is included too! That includes FireWire connecting cable, Intech HD Speedtools Utility Suite for Mac, Prosoft DataBackup III and NovaBackup, 1 Year OWC Full Solution Warranty + an additional 2 to 4 years factory warranty on the hard drive mechanisms we use inside! See Complete listing/pricing on 80GB to 1TB Neptune drives. Also available as an Enclosure kit from $39.99.

"I own a 15 inch bottom line Macbook pro (128mb Nvidia 8600M GT) that I also bought about this time last year (about a month before the begining of college). I noticed the problems just 4 days ago for the first time. I was playing Civilization 4 on my windows partition when I suddenly got a grainy checkerboard pattern on my screen. So the first thing I did then was restart and see if it also happened in my Leopard partition and it did about 10 minutes into my game of Warcraft 3 TFT. After fiddling with it for a while I came to the conclusion that anything video intensive set this off (the checkerboard distortion).
I started to monitor the video card temperature using iStat pro (freeware system stats widget) and my guess is that when i reach about 80 degrees C I get the mentioned problem. Oh and I forgot to mention that this error is fatal.. as in shortly after everything else stops working my mouse stops moving on screen as well. The first thing I did to try to combat this was to reinstall Leopard after clearing the drive. I didn't call apple for this because I am out of warranty... very convenient that this happens within a month of losing coverage. Then it happened again shortly after completeing the install.

So I shut the damn thing off and turn it back on. Then I installed FAN CONTROL. (I think he means SMC FanControl2, which some readers have used to boost fan speeds during gaming (increase cooling/reduce throttle down due to heat)-Mike)
I set the upper threshold temp to 70 degrees (the lowest allowed). I also set the minimum fan speed to 2500 rpms. Since then I have not had the problem once. I even just played warcraft 3 for about 2 hours straight with no issues. I don't know what will happen when and if I try to play Civ 4 on windows, but I'm just glad I don't have to get a new video card for now. I always had a feeling that 80 C was just way too high, so I guess it finally took its toll on my card, that now (w/boosted fan speeds) seems to operate completely fine. I'm keeping my fingers crossed in hopes that it was just a fluke or a software issue....
-Sebastian"

Still nothing official from Apple if any MBP production runs included Nvidia GPUs with the mfg/pkg issue (mentioned previously by Nvidia, Dell, HP and another article today $196M Should Cover Costs of Bad Graphics Chips) - but cooler is always better and thermal cycling reportedly is a factor in failures for those suspect GPUs (i.e. temperature cycles of heat/cool down of the GPU)..

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