"~Its a far far better thing I do than to require that you find me a hammer and pummel me with all due diligence, but yet remember that it is I, your solicitor, who keeps you from aligning too much with the listerine salesman." What does that mean?
Assemblers like Dell don't go around adding fans to video cards. Esecially assemblers like Dell and Gateway who cater to price conscious buyers. Just a quick lesson for folks who are kinda new to the whole multi-tiered video card thing, nVidia makes video-card chipsets, and various manufacturers put that chipset on a card and sell it. For instance, I am writing this on a Chaintech Geforce4 4600. nVidia made the chipset, but Chaintech put it on a board. There are at least three other vendors ofGeForce 4 4600 cards, and they are the ones who choose what fans to put where. GeForce cards typically are EDIT: or were, anyways the highest end cards when they first come out, so they are most likely correct and you probably did have a high end video card for the time. However, if some manufacturer made a GeForce card that ran slow due to heat issues, that major mistake would have made very wide ripples in the industry. They would be infamous, an example of where not to go to get a video card. That kind of stuff ruins a company. Video "remakers" (my word for them) live largely on rep alone. A company that did that would be as famous as Value America is in the retail world - a classic screw-up. Unless Dell made some tragic mistake like buying video cards from Bill and Ted's Most Excellent Video Cards and Bait Shop. . . Not to say I believe in anything like "Company X can do no wrong." Or even "Company Y would never cancel their values for survival." I wish I could recall whether Geforce 1s had a fan as a rule. Don't remember. Anyway, I would have been highly suspicious of such a demonstration. I know there are other components that slow down due to heat (such as Intel chips), but I have never heard of video cards engaging in thermal monitoring. If they did, it seems to me that folks would build video card temp stats into their CMOSs. . .