Verax G03 cooler on my 9800 and unrelated (?) OpenGL problems

Reading an article about the Verax G03 on www.xlr8yourmac.com I bought one because the fan noise of my G5 has become increasingly annoying, since I dumped my noisy linux box for a silent DSL router. The noisy linux box drowned out all other noises :)

The installation went fairly painlessly until I had to remove the optical drive (for the juice), which was a major pain. I needed to pry it out with a screwdriver. Argh!

Then I ran a few test benchmarks to check if things still work fine.

Well I am not quite sure. Stupidly I did no do any reference tests before but only checked after the fact. Something's funny somewhere...

Using the ill-reputed X-Bench I score surprisingly low numbers with the Spinning Squares test. I only got 81 fps. Now that just sux for the amount of computer power thrown at the test. But Panther appears to be the reason, I booted into 10.2.8 and got 117.9 fps. Strange. This is also slower than a published figure, which yields 121.04 fps.

Interestingly I am missing about the same percentage when running Quake 3 (294 fps vs 305 fps) so something is slowing down my OpenGL But it can't be the cooler...

Was it worth it. ? I don't think so. I don't hear the graphics card any longer, that's true. So the Verax G03 is working great. The G5 is quieter, but it's noises are still getting on my nerves. Now the system fans are much more noticeable and I can hear harddisk accesses much better. I expect that the sound of the system revving up will have a psychologically even worse effect than before.

All in all I'd say it's not worth the €52 (!) I spent on this for the G5. If prices come down to €20 it would be a OK deal.