Video Card Obituary

This past Tuesday, I came home from the usual grind to a family meal, where I stuffed my face with Domino's Pizza. After I was nice and bloated, my old man turns to me and says: "Well, now that you're stuffed and happy, your computer died." So after doing some testing and even an attempted Windows XP Repair, I determined the issue to be hardware related, so I had to take it in.

Turns out my nVidia GeForce 7600 GT 256 MB had essentially died on me, and was preventing my system from booting up in all but Safe Mode. Now, since I don't game too much on my PC since I went back to consoles, mainly using my good ol' computer for blogging, forum surfing, and porn, I didn't want to spend a lot of coin on a high end card, so I went for a simple nVidia GeForce 9500 GT 512 MB. Very similar to my previous GPU, so it'll do fine, and it has more vRam, which'll help out a bit in the long run.

And the moral of the story is I can look at boobies again. Yay!

On a side note, I also like how nVidia only mentions their involvement with the PlayStation 3 on their site, and not the original Xbox, which is too bad since the Xbox is still some quality classic hardware.

I've had some great luck with nVidia graphics cards to date. Originally I had a 3dfx Voodoo III, and as you may recall, 3dfx was bought by nVidia once they declined (which was too bad given how instrumental and revolutionary 3dfx was to 3D cards), so transferring loyalties to nVidia made some good sense. My original nVidia GeForce 4 MX 440 64 MB, a card everyone said was junk, worked wonders for me and really let me get a lot out of gaming. Honestly, no complaints with that little guy, and it's too bad Valve Software fried my system. Stupid Valve.

The Xbox's custom GPU had some very impressive graphics for it's day, and really outshone the PlayStation 2, and my previous nVidia GeForce 7600 GT 256 MB let me take my gaming to the next level and really experience some great titles from a few years back, well, right up to this year, actually. Not impressed that it died very quickly though, lasting only 2.5 years, so I'll see what happens with my new card.

If it too has a short life span, I'll likely take a good look at the competition for my next graphics card.