NEED HELP. Very screwed up situation!!!!!!!!

Have you tried calling the manufacturer for a replacement? Normally video cards have at least a one year warranty and dead fans are not all that unusual. If you can't get anywhere on the warranty you can usually get a cheap fix like this slot fan. You just insert it in an empty slot next to the video card and it will blow on the video card's heatsink. That's usually enough to cool down a card like a 5700. You can also get after-market fans to put on video cards but they are a bit challenging to install. By the way, I wouldn't blame NVIDIA for dead fans. ATI fans die too.

If you'd rather consider a new video card then you should probably increase your budget a little to $130-$150 and get an AGP GeForce 6600GT. That's a very good card for the price and it will have a decent lifespan. You'll have to order over the Internet to get that kind of deal. www.newegg.com has good prices and they accept personal checks. You can also occasionally find deals on used Radeon 9700 Pros or 9800 Pros. They're a little out of date (I have one) but they're still fast enough to run current games fairly well and they will run future games properly if you reduce the screen resolution by a notch or two.

Speaking of which, whould it be to complicated to ask what really is the benefit between a 256MB card like the 5700VE and the 128MB 6600GT?

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Borrowed from a previous post of mine:

When you're buying a video card the best thing to get is a card which is well balanced. It should have the right combination of pixel shaders, vertex shaders, memory bandwidth, and amount of RAM. It's easy to buy unbalanced cards which are strong in one area and weak in others.

For example, GeForce 6600s often come with 256MB. That's a four pixel pipe card with tons of RAM. The extra RAM rarely helps it because it doesn't have sufficient drawing speed to display models which require that much video RAM. Every now and then it runs quicker than a 128MB GeForce 6600 but most of the time their speeds are the same. Then there are some real abominations like GeForce 6200s which come with 512MB. Those cards are basically a marketing scam to fool people who don't know any better.

In the $150 range the most balanced cards have 128MB. Getting a 256MB card in that price range means slowing down the shader speed which you always need to add extra RAM from which you'll rarely benefit. If you're looking at $200 and up then it starts to make sense to get 256MB to help you in future games although it doesn't help you in most current games.

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128MB is the "right" amount for a card like a 6600GT. For a 5700 like yours you would probably get about the same performance if it had 128MB. The 256MB doesn't hurt it and on occasion may help it a bit but for the most part you'd be just as well off with 128MB. 256MB isn't very useful in most cases until you get into some faster video cards.

Regarding the slot fan:
If you place the slot fan in the slot below your 5700, it will suck air past the 5700's heatsink and exhaust the warm air out the back of the computer. That will probably be sufficient to cool your video card as it is. If that doesn't cool it enough then you can build a small air duct by getting a piece of cardboard and taping it to the slot fan. All you have to do is bend the cardboard in a "U" shape with the open part of the "U" aiming forward. That will pull the cool air in from the front of the video card, pull the air past the heatsink, and then the slot fan exhausts it out the back of the case. When you see them sitting next to each other in the slot you'll see what I mean. Try it first without the cardboard duct because it will probably move enough air with any extra help.

I'd also advise not running the video card in 3D mode until you get the slot fan. If you overheat a GPU too much you can permanently damage it. If it can still run for a while in 3D mode before it has problems then it's still probably reasonably functional but you don't need to make it any worse by overheating it more. I've seen plenty of people with fans which die unnoticed who still end up with reasonably functional video cards once they fix the fan problem. Now and then they have to replace the video card but most of the time fixing the fan is sufficient.

Just don't play games, use 3D screen savers, or run any programs which display 3D images like 3D modeling programs. For most people the only programs which run in 3D mode are games.

You need to match the amount of video RAM to the drawing speed of the video card. 3D models with higher image quality require more video RAM to hold the higher quality models. There's little point going beyond a certain amount of video RAM for a video card with a given drawing speed because the card isn't fast enough to draw the higher quality models which use up the extra video RAM. Currently a 6600GT is about right with 128MB. A 6800GT benefits some from 256MB and will benefit more in the future. The only cards where 512MB would make any sense would be $500 cards like a 7800GTX and only in the future when games include enough high quality models to take advantage of it.