One of my first posts on this blog was about upgrades. I stated at that time that I would probably never upgrade my current computer. Well that turned out to be totally not true, as thus far I have added a new hard drive, a USB PCI add-in card, case lights, a new power supply, and now a new graphics card. Or to be more precise an old graphics card, which a friend had swapped out for a newer part. In the summer of 2008 we got together and assembled a nice gaming computer with a Radeon 3870 graphics card and an Intel Q6600 quad core. Unfortunatley for him the machine was plagued with problems from the start. The first suspect that was eliminated was the graphics card, which we suspected to be faulty, due to frequent BSODs, even with updated drivers. He replaced the card with a newer 4850 Radeon. The computer still doesn't work but that will be another blog post.
I requested the card from him, and without hesitation he mailed it to me. In about a week the card appeared on my doorstep, in tact and nicely nestled in packing peanuts. The install went smoothly on both Windows 7 and Windows XP. The hardware install even forced me to clean up some wiring in my case, as it seems somewhat neater now. The pre-release drivers for Windows 7 work great even with my older games. The card has passed several 6 hours GPU Folding at home session without pause. No BSOD, no crashes. As well as Folding at home, the card has also performed smoothly through several run-thoughs of Source SDK stress test. At 1680x1050 resolution with all options maxed, the 3870 gave a result of 51 frames per second average.
I would not have normally purchased a video card upgrade, but when its free, I can't argue with upgrades.
No comments:
Post a Comment