EPTToday was truely christmas 10 days early for me. This weekend I purchased a few items from ebay assuming they would arrive just before xmas. I really needed, well actually need is a strong word, I really WANTED a new gfx card and so I got online and did a little research.
I had a budget of around £50 to upgrade my gf's computer (now my computer by right of "yoink") with a new GFX card, so i did a quick search on TL.net to see what I could turn up in the way of a comparitive list of cards or perhaps some good first hand accounts of a decent card that I might get cheap. It took a while but i found a post in which the following link could be found:
http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/high_end_gpus.html
That link is for an awesome list of pretty much every GFX card on the market, ranked by score on some benchmarking tests. Its one hell of a list and I instantly started to drool as I saw some familiar names, I knew I wouldn't be able to afford most of the cards right at the top, even if i could snipe one off ebay cheap it was still probably going to be over my budget.
So I thought I would check to see what score my card got and then just pick one that did alot better, my card could not be found on this list. To find my card i had to switch over from the "high-end" list to the "OMFG ur card sux" list. The current card cost me about £40 from PCworld, I happened to be in there before going to the cinema and thought "While I'm here I'll grab a cheap card to replace the onboard one, then i can play games on her computer". Genius. Well not really, but it meant i could play games and that was cool, even if the card did suck.
Fast Forward nine months or so and I'm now addicted to SC2, I've been running it on low at around 60fps with my shitty G210 and quite happy with that. Then i started to stream and realised that the G210 wasn't gonna cut it anymore.... I must have the performance I desire!
Now the computer isn't half bad, its got a 2.2ghz quad core, 4gb RAM and when streaming neither my CPU or memory were over 50% but ofc my shitty GFX card was ruining everything!!!!!!!! It just couldn't do what I needed!!!!! I want to do some casting and streaming in HD using my 5mb upload!!!!!!!
So i spent the weekend on ebay, trying to snipe some of the cards on that list the scored somewhere around 1000. I thought that was a reasonble enough score (and around five times higher than my current card) to allow me to do what I wanted, my stream might not look like TheGunRun's in quality but I would be able to stream and play without dipping to 10fps on one or the other.
It took me all weekend but on sunday night at 11pm I finally managed to snipe one of my target cards, an ASUS GeForce 8800 GTX, for just £36!!! woot..... now I just needed cables and OMFG..... a new PSU, forgot about that... dammit. This task was much easier though, taking only three minutes. I found a 700W re-furbished PSU with all the right connectors for just £20. All that was left to buy were some adapters for the molex leads and a DVI to HDMI adapter.
It totalled out to just under £60.
When it all arrived I was like a little boy ripping open the packaging. I immediately installed the PSU and rebooted the computer to just check that it worked ok, then I moved on to the GFX card.
This thing is a beast, i really wish i had taken a pic of it next to my old one lol. It wouldn't fit into the case, the HDD's and their mountings were in the way, if only the card were an inch shorter. I'm really lazy and therefore my HDD's weren't screwed in on both sides which made the task of moving them much easier, I also had to knock through some of the rivets holding the HDD mounts. This was another lazy solution to simply bend the mount out of the way! I also had to move the sata cables from sockets 1&3 to 3&4 and do some crazy stuff with the wires to make everything still reach where it needed to go.
You can't see just how badly its all wedged in but here's a couple pics:
+ Show Spoiler +
These images are directly from my camera...... TL can't resize them right
![[image loading]](http://i678.photobucket.com/albums/vv142/ka1g/DSC_0011.jpg)
![[image loading]](http://i678.photobucket.com/albums/vv142/ka1g/DSC_0010.jpg)
![[image loading]](http://i678.photobucket.com/albums/vv142/ka1g/DSC_0012.jpg)
Its all in now and working fine, i booted up SC2 and immediately went into a replay to check my FPS, slapped everything up to full and was at 50fps.... nearly as good as my old card on low ;p
I'm sure I can still get more out of the card, I just need to have some time to mess with stuff in the nvidia panel.
Anyways, this was just a very nice day for me and I thought I would share my happiness with some other nerds. Before I go, I recently put up my SC2 shrine and thought I'd share that too.... They will all be in frames just as soon as my gf allows me to buy them lol.
![[image loading]](http://i678.photobucket.com/albums/vv142/ka1g/mywall_1.jpg)
![[image loading]](http://i678.photobucket.com/albums/vv142/ka1g/mywall2_1.jpg)
![[image loading]](http://imgur.com/tMN2R.jpg)
![[image loading]](http://imgur.com/2iOZj.jpg)
