i'll tell ya, when i got my vantec iceberg 4 and was installing it on my 9800 Pro, i did find it necessary to remove the shim
the best way i found to do it is with a good modelling knife, just work it under a corner (a corner without the gold inlay) and move it back and forth kinda like a saw...
my genereal experience is that cranking the resolution while lowering the AA generally yields better picture at higher FPS
i usually run most thingst at 1600x1200 w/2xAA and 16xAF
so, about your video card
how hot is your case?
did you install the HSF on the GPU yourself?
have you OCed anything in your system?
what power supply do you have? (bad power supplies can sometimes cause components to overheat and fail)
xaser cases are overrated
i have an incredible ammount of cooling power with my chenbro xspider pc6166 with just 2 80mm fans, it has AWSOME mobo mounting, AWSOME card locking and incredibly easy access, one of the best cases i've ever owned
concerning the heavyweights, this isn't a few FPS, this is almost a 20fps lead, a 33% increase in performance from a 5900 that's not even running on the dx 9 standard codepath to a 9800 Pro that is
if you don't have the money to buy one of the more expensive cases, i'd recommend the Chenbro Xspider model PC61166
it's got nothing but rave reviews all over the net, is only about 50 bucks over at newegg
i got one myself, i love it
as far as i know, there is no commercial intel or amd mobo that can clock the cpu or RAM fsb seperately, you can lock the AGP and PCI, but not the RAM, that has to be in sync with the cpu FSB
there is no hijackage
we've already established that it's gonna be released most likely on the 30th, there's not much else to talk about in that regard, so i'm posting things relative to the article you linked
no hijackage