xrinti

Thanks for the advice, but it didn't really sound like something I was going to be readily able to do (my card had a weird custom cooler from the manufacturer). I replaced it with the Zalman ZF700-Cu (with the help of my friend) and 3 hours later am still running sub-55 even with fairly high end 3D game playing. So, problem resolved.

Oh, I've put the computer together myself at various times in the past but it's tricky and my hands are too large to do some of the installation required without injury (seriously, I've cut myself on the boards). And I've managed to screw it up enough that I fried a motherboard and power supply (I hooked the four pin detachable bit of the 24 pin power supply connector to the wrong thing and sent much, much more power into it than I should have.).

So these days unless it's something relatively simple (I'll do my own RAM installation when I go up to 2 gigs, for example) I find it better to rely on my friend Eddy, who's more familiar with hardware, less likely to screw up catastrophically, has better tools, and smaller hands. In this case...I probably could have eventually figured out how to take the previous cooler off and put the new one on, but I didn't want to risk any damage at all to the video card that I had paid 400 dollars for back in the day. (Replacing it would of course be cheaper now, but not *cheap*.)