Subscribe to Posts
Subscribe to CommentsIndividual Entry: Playing Games
« Visions of the future |
Main
| Life, assembly required »
If you read this blog, PLEASE sign in to my guest book on frappr.
No personally identifying information is needed, so this is risk-free. Just provide a name (even a nickname), your zip code, and any statement you want to make ("hi" is sufficient).If you want to know more about me, click here.
November 04, 2005
Life : Playing Games
For the last few months, the graphics processor on my computer's video card has been dying. It worked fine when I was doing "normal" stuff (web surfing, wing Word, etc.); but started to die (crashing the computer) when I played graphically-intense games. The Mean Time to Failure started at about an hour of play, and then slowly dropped down to about 5 minutes (which basically made games unplayable). Well, I finally got around to getting the board replaced as of Wednesday.
All this is by way of explanation of why there have been no blog entries for the last couple of days – I have been quite busy playing the games I have been unable to play in recent weeks. (For those who are interested, the big winner is "Civilization IV").
Posted by Steven at November 4, 2005 08:42 AM
Comments
Well I'm sure you can invest in a Nvidia 6800GT!
Even better get them in Dual SLI!
I'm sure you could get them in a new system for ONLY
US$3000!
Posted by: Josh at November 5, 2005 12:39 AM
Let's see... The Nvida7800 GTX (not to be confused with the Atari 7800) can be found from different vendors in different configurations for $450 and up. Of course, you would need a motherboard that supported SLI chipset; the Asus A8N SLI Premium is a good match if you use the AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800+ CPU (check out Computer Power User November 2005 for the Dream Machine article). Then there are the "other" components you may want to upgrade while you are at it. But wait! Do you anticipate needing the "hot" new capability: a physics processing unit? Well, that changes everything... {grin}
Did you know there is now a power supply that can supply 1Kwatt for your game intensive system? And here I thought 800 watts would do it... At least I don't have to run the A/C during the winter! And the residual heat from the computers warms the office nicely (the electric bill actually drops!).
Wait, wait, wait-a-minit. Steve, you are on WinTel rather than Mac, no? I've lost track...
Posted by: Morrie at November 10, 2005 09:28 AM
My current game system is a 32.GHz Wintel box with 2Gb memory and a Raedon (ATI) 9800XT GPU. My hope is that I won't actually need to upgrade it for at least another year (my system was under full warrantee, so the replacement GPU – of the same model – was free)
Posted by: Steven at November 10, 2005 09:42 AM
