Blain beats me to it again. I swear, it's almost like he's ready to start helping people again.
😉
Answer 1: It probably does. My 8800GT used to hit nearly 90C while under a heavy load, like Crysis. It's not the big deal for GPUs that it is for CPUs. If you're worried about it, there are a few things you can do.
- Use a monitoring utility to turn up the fan speed on the card. This should help keep it down, but it will make the card louder.
- Buy a PCI slot exhaust fan and mount it next to the graphics card. Again, this will make the system louder.
- Buy an aftermarket cooler such as the Accelero S1. My idle temps have dropped about 15-20 degrees and my load temps as much as 20-30 with the Accelero installed on my 8800GT, and that's running without a fan. The only company I know of that allows this without voiding the warranty is XFX, but they don't make ATI cards.
Answer 2: Blain suggested the one I was going to. That's a great deal on a very high quality PSU. When I got mine it was on sale and I still paid $5-10 more for it. I love it.
Answer 3: The CPU will come with a heatsink, and that heatsink will have thermal compound already applied to the base of it. There's really no need for the aftermarket cooler, especially one so expensive, on a CPU that isn't being overclocked. If you're just getting the cooler to reduce noise, look at something less expensive like the Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro. (And again, I'd echo Blain that there's no reason to pay for DDR2-1000 if you're not overclocking.)
Answer 4:
http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3341&p=13
I jumped straight to the first page of benchmarks, but you can move around the article to get more info in general, and there are several pages of comparisons.
Answer 5: ASUS is just about as good as it gets at the consumer level in terms of build quality. I have an ASUS board that I bought used out of a dusty cardboard box at a yard sale that's still ticking for what it's worth. On the other hand, since he's not overclocking there'd be nothing wrong with getting an Intel motherboard, and they tend to be the most stable ones out there.
