My Rig I affectionately call “m0nk3y” has undergone a cosmetic and functional overhaul.
I first step in rebuilding “m0nk3y” was to find a new case, I found a company called NZXT these guys make once of the craziest cases I have ever seen, it is a standard mid tower sized case, but it gets funky with its well cut side window and L.E.D. “eye”. I saw this case, and the wheels started spinning.
I transferred the guts of my Rig from one case to the other, but alas its still did not feel like I was done…and it was still noisy.
I have always been a little wary of water cooling, water inside a case just seemed strange to me, but since I was out to kill the noise of my 5 80mm fans (158 dbs or 2 people talking right next to my desk) So I decided this would be the time I played with water cooling, I picked up an Kingwin Artic cooler this kit comes with very nice 2 water blocks (1 CPU and 1 GPU) 2 radiators (one bolts to your standard 80mm fan mount, the other slides into a 5 1/4 drive bay). This kit installed no problem, however while I was “bleeding” the tubing of air bubbles, I fried my 9800 pro…yeah leaving a card in the AGP slot with no cooling…rookie mistake.
So back to zipzoomfly I go, here’s where it gets “interesting” I decided to get the exact same card I had, but try to pay less.
I found a good deal on the MSI ATI 9800 pro. I ordered the card and went to the ARSTechnica forums to see what the kids had to say. I found out that MSI built the card with the same Core as the 9800xt in essence you can run your 9800 pro as a 9800 pro XT (but only with 128mbs of ram).
When I got the card home I installed it, along with a new 500wt power supply, I then went to the techpoerup site and got the ATI tool. This utility allows you to tweak your ATI based card, it has features such as finding the optimal Core and Memory speed or allowing the user to set these speeds manually. No matter how you decide to do it the ATItool allows you to check for artifacts on the output of the card. I currently have my card set as follows:

Overclock speed Core: 408.38 / 361.13 (base)
Default speed Memory: 378.00 / 338.00 (base)

I received an extra 300 points on my 3dmark score, and its good to know I am getting the most I can out of the card.
While the ATI tool is running it will put major load on your CPU, however with the water cooling the temps over 2hrs while the ATI tool was running were:

Normal = 38.6 c /98.24 f
100% CPU usage Temps = 47.6c /117.68 f

So when everything was said and done, ‘Liquid m0nk3y” was back up and running. A little faster and a lot quieter.
I would also like to thank Fico for lending me a ti 4200 for troubleshooting, and allowing me my videogame “fix” while the new parts were traveling to Boston.
Have a good weekend Monkeys