The Video Card Adventure!

[Freakie_frog]

Got in the mood to upgrade my PC..I'm running a fairly standard rig 3.2GHZ intel quad core, with 4 GB or DDR3 RAM, 500gb HDD.. So looking at the things that are quick bolt on I opted to update my wireless router, HDD, RAM and Video card.

Got a 2TB SATA HDD DONE!

Got 4-2GB sticks of DDR3 ram DONE!

Got the Linksys e3000 wireless router DONE!

Then I got a Radeon HD 4350 1GB of GDDR2.. here's where the fun starts

installed the GPU. fired up the rig.. my whole screen has a blue green tint to it.. So I go back through the whole process of uninstalling the drivers enabling the old GPU ect.ect. Do a fresh install of the card same thing.. Well by this time its 1:30am (We nerds work best under the cover of night). I gave up a decided to take it to the Geek Squad today.

Get to the squad guy plug it in and is like oh wow looks like you got a bad card . ya think? He goes and gets another one, offers to install it for free. Got the new one installed, fire up the box and it's snowing..yep another faulty card. well being that it was the last one of that model on the shelf we went and got one that was 10.00 more expensive $10.00 little did I know. He throws that one over in there, Blue Screen of DEATH system wont even boot, Yep another bad card all from the same maker..

By now I've had enough..Lets get one we know will work no questions asked..
So we walk to the back he point pick one of these two $229.00 and $179.99

I got the $179.99 he pulls it out and holy crap..


Slap it in and Poof everything is just fine..

So after spending 179.99 and 1.5 hours what did I get

one video card (that works)
two Digital HD movie downloads with the card
three Free installs by the gee squad
a free copy of Call of Duty Black Ops
and hole in my wallet to match the headach.

[waltah!]

hey at least it came with black ops glad you finally got it all up and running. Seems like a pretty sweet system now for sure.

[Freakie_frog]

I was mistaken it was Modern Warfare 2 not Black Ops..After playing around with it I can run COD Modern Warfare 2 full screen at 1690x1050 and get 53-60 FPS on the benchmark..I was utterly shocked at how responsive and great the image looks to bad my main board only has one PCI-e slot or it would be SLI here I come..

[DarrinLowe]

Haha sounds like quite the scramble, I've never had a problem with nvidia cards. In terms of out of the box use. I've been running one of their dual-core video cards for over almost a year now and it works gread (HD 5970 I believe)

It was actually pretty interesting, I had the original dualcore vc which was the GTX 295 (Red), and it killed itself in months, and the place I got it from gave me a 5970 for free, which is significantly better, and more expensive.

That seems like a pretty solid rig though, hopefully all is running well and continues to. It is always an expensive journey when it comes to PC parts.

[Freakie_frog]

Well New egg finally came through from me..I've been running the system on 4gb of ram waiting on my back order of 8gb to show up..just got notice that it'll be here tomorrow..
So I'll be going from 4gb to 8gb and a faster clock speed so we'll see if it makes a difference, new egg threw in a cooler master memory cooler to go along with the OCZ gold memory.. I'm set till I build my "Gaming rig" but that's going to be a work in progress..cause the core i7 980 is a little out of my price range.. 1K for the processor is on up there.