Hey, it's been a while. Ever since I sold my Radeon R9 380, there's been an emptyness of sorts. I couldn't play anything made past 2004 at higher settings with the Intel HD 2000, even giving it a generous 200MHz+ boost didn't do much at all.
So out comes the Nvidia Geforce 8500 GT (Edit: Turns out it's the MSI version, no wonder the PCB is red) I had lying around, it had a crappy cooling solution so I intended to fix that. This is my v2 that's still a WIP, I intend to cut up an old Intel heatsink and use the pieces as heatsinks for the VRAM.
Behind the Intel fan, lies a heatsink I nabbed from a HD 3450 from ASUS. I redid the mounting slightly so it fits the PCB and doesn't get in the way of the components. Lucky for me the PCB had a ton of unused holes near the chip already. The rubber bands are for that extra home-made feel.
PROTIP: If the PCI-E contacts get gunked up, get yourself a soft pencil eraser and give it a good ol' rub (hehe boi). Once the contacts are shiny you're good to go! Note: Only do this if you don't have professional cleaning tools, it's possible to kill the card, but I haven't been able to do that myself.
I just felt like doing something to get rid of the boredom. I hope you like it!
Edit: Based on benchmarks and some older games, the Intel iGPU beats the 8500 GT by a small margin. I actually thought a dedicated GPU would run better since it is be able to run Dishonored on very low settings and TES IV: Oblivion on high settings, oh well. Maybe at some point I will pick up a GTS 450 and "upgrade" it so I could overclock it.