nVidia 7800GT doesn't like VGA

[tevion5]

I recently acquired a lovely original 7800GT for my Dual Core G5. It will ultimately end up in my Quad when I eventually get one. It is working great and runs games like AOE III and Quake 4 without any trouble.

The funny thing is though, it will not work with DVI-VGA adapters. The monitor will light up and detect a connection, but it never actually displays any image. DVI monitors work perfectly, and I have tried different DVI-VGA adapters and only got the same result. Is there something I should know. At the moment I have to connect any VGA monitors to one of the ports of the now secondary 6600LE. Question: are images on the secondary card still processed by the primary GPU in this case? Or are they both totally seperate? I would have assumed the former, but HD video playback is way better on monitors connected to the 7800GT. When I drag them over to a monitor on the 6600LE, the frame rate halves.

Also: Due to it's age, somebody mentioned something about reapplying thermal paste? Is that worth it? As well, are there any drivers I need to download in particular, or does Leopard already have everything needed? I couldn't find any 7800GT drivers for mac online.

 

[Altemose]

@tevion5 I am not familiar with this card so I will let the GPU experts on the forum chime in. However, I recommend re-applying fresh thermal paste to any device over five years old. Thermal paste does degrade in relation to usage. I have reapplied thermal paste to a number of different cards in the past year or so and I have seen some with nearly new thermal paste that did not need to be replaced that were seven years old and some that had the paste burnt and crusted on which did little in heat transfer that were a bit younger.