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May 14, 2005
graphics card envy
My new copy of Maximum PC came in yesterday. It makes my system feel awfully old, and my recent performance problems have been making me seriously consider an upgrade.
About 8 months ago, I upgraded my system to an AMD Athlon FX-55, an Asus A8V-Deluxe, and an Asus X800 XT PE, AGP version. Those of you computer geeks in the audience probably think the AGP card was a dumb move, and it was. I was contemplating the PCI-e version, but I kept thinking about losing the extra PCI slots. I realize now that was a very bad move, and will likely mean I need a complete mobo/gfx upgrade in the near future. My X800 XT PE has been acting up the last few months, and gradually getting worse. It just generates too much heat for its own good, and no amount of cooling I can put on it seems to help much. ATI made a bad move with making the X800 a single slot card, and the cooler on the ASUS one is particularly flimsy. I finally downgraded to an old 9800 XT that I had lying around the house because it had become impossible to play games that my old Geforce 3 could run 4 years ago. The system feels more steady now, but that is a short term fix.
Maximum PC hightened my urge to upgrade when I looked at the reviews of new computers they had in there. Even midrange computers have more horsepower then my rig these days. The "zero point" system that all other computers they review are measured as a percent improvement against is an AMD Athlon FX-55, 2 GB low-latency RAM, Asus A8N-SLI-Deluxe, and Dual PCI-e nVidia 6800 Ultras with 256 MB graphics memory each. That system puts mine to shame performance wise, and thier reviews of systems with dual graphics cards with 512 MB graphics memory PER CARD made my single-card computer with 256 MB total seem completely underpowered.
Thier zero-point system would kick my computer's ass any day, yet I still consider my computer to be "powerful". I keep holding off until the next big generation of graphics cards, but I'm really not sure about it. Maybe an upgrade is in order before then.
And I'll keep kicking myself for not getting an SLI board the last time I upgraded the system.
Posted by Raculot at May 14, 2005 03:35 PM
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