Sunday, September 26, 2004
So yesterday I went shopping for another graphics card.The more I read about the one I'd recently bought, the less impressed I was. It seems my old (new) card is sold so cheap coz it'd crippleware. When making the 9600 chipset, they had a bad batch where only 4 of the 8 pipelines worked, so the manufacurers take their 128 bit chip, stick it on a 64 bit bus, and use a software patch to make it work, albeit at half capacity. Thing is, they dont bother to tell anyone about that.... or at least, the shops dont.
Annoyingly, most of the shops I tried have that card and sell it like its the dogs bollocks... which it most certainly isnt. Worse, PC World looked at me like I was nuts when I told them I was looking for something more powerful. They had a range of decent Nvidia cards 'on display', but did they have them in stock? Hell no!
So finally, the last place I looked, a crappy little shop in town that I swore I'd never go to finally turns out to be useful.
They had the same card I already had, but pleasingly, also had the next card up in the range. More than that, the sales assistant actually knew what I was talking about and understood why I didnt rate the 9600SE.
So anyway, I now have a funky new ATI Radeon 9800 in my machine, and everything runs not just well, but brilliantly. All my emulated games (even the Sega System 2 games) run super smooth, and Farcry is running with maximum settings on all the graphics options with not a flicker of slowdown.
I'm a happy chappy :-)
Labels: annoyed, graphics cards
Steve 5:42 PM [+]
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