Easy answer, fans. Unless you're an enthusiast or a heavy overclocker liquid cooling is both risky and expensive. However, you could always look for a quiet and decent cooler if that's what you want. If noise isn't an issue there's usually not much difference except if you buy one yourself too cheap it might break because of quality. Personally I recommend one that's quiet if you sit long periods of time in front of the computer.

Doesn't that depend on the (GOG) game? For example:

- Many NVidia users seem to have reported problems with e.g. Sacrifice and Gorky 17, apparently those games behave better on AMD cards on the whole.

- ATI/AMD users used to have problems with Dungeon Keeper 2 (until GOG fixed it for good), while NVidia users kept playing it without issues..

I think there are lots of other examples too, on both sides. I have now both AMD and NVidia hardware in the household (albeit the AMD hardware is considerably older generation), so at least I should be able to check which seem to yield better results with my GOG games. The infamous Gorky 17 ran pretty fine for me on AMD, I'm interested to try it out now on GeForce, whether it is really the hell that some say.

No the demo of gorky 17 worked fine on mine 0.o dungeon keeper 2 is a win95 game the demo of sacrifice worked good as well must be driver issues then?!?

I currently have a GTX680. No issues with old games. As far as i know, the only game that doesn't like nvidia cards is Gorky 17.

I hate to be a pain, but what GOG versions of games have you tried on it?

You're not being a pain in any way, i'll be glad to help you with your decision.

So far the GOG games i have played on my current GTX680 were:

Darkstone, Disciples, Ultima VII, Syndicate, Giants Citizen Kabuto, Septerra Core, Iron Storm, and Blood 2. I think that's it, if i remember anything else i'll post here.

I also have a few old physical games here that i ran recently on my GTX680, such as KKND2, Chasm The Rift, Meat Puppet (i had to make a VM for this one though, since it does not work on any OS above Win 98) and Dark Earth.

Honestly, when it comes to old games the OS is a bigger problem than the GPU. I still couldn't find any game that didn't work on my PC.

If you are so concerned about old games i really suggest that you keep a XP partition on your HD, because some old games don't even install on Windows 7.

The GTX680 is an expensive card, buy if you really want performance, you can't go wrong with it. It's the best single-GPU card on the market right now. And it's compability with older games is not different to any GPU released in the last 6 years (when the current shaders architecture became the norm).

If you haven't chosen card yet I still recommend the GTX660Ti. :)

I'm using a GTX 560ti and can run the following GOG games without issues:

Baldur's Gate 1 and 2
Icewind Dale 1 and 2*
Temple of Elemental Evil
Planescape:Torment
Neverwinter Nights
Trine
Machinarium
Nox
Divine Divinity
Arcanum


Games I've fired up but not played more than a few minutes so far (so they seem to work fine, but not telling for sure):

Inquisitor
Two Worlds
Alan Wake & American Nightmare
Demon Stone
Realms of Arkania 3


I think the drivers are the same for the 5 and 6 series cards, so hopefully that helps.