Monday, October 20, 2008

From 32 Shaders to 112 Shaders Finally

Finally one of my dreams met with reality; Playing all the games out there with all the eye candies at high resolutions... A High end VGA card was a luxurious item back in 2007. Offerings from ATi couldn't give a neck to neck fight to nVidia's stronger counterparts. Finally ATi came up with a real competitor "The RV770" which brought as much as twice the performance of the not much successful predecessor R600. nVidia went haywire from seeing unexpected success of the RV770. That was the start of the flooding of the VGA market. We could see at least one VGA card once a week be it ATi or nVidia. The price point of so called High-End VGAs were falling to previous mid-range or sometimes Low-End cards' price points.

w00t!.. The most popular High End VGA; The8800GT that took enthusiasts' hearts  by like a storm was available as low as 110$ on newegg.
The time arrived for me to invest on a new hot babe finally. A PNY 8800GT was available on SLmega.com for 19k, that is a reasonable price compared to Unity Plaza prices. And few days later I spotted an EVGA 9800GT for 20k on SLmega. I searched all over the internet about this PNY 88GT but the impression among users of this PNY card was not convincing. That wasn't the case with EVGA, So i decided to pay additional 1k for the EVGA card even though its the same 88GT G92 with a 98GT label on it. So the long awaited hot babe arrived to SLmega local store after 12 days of my initial payment.

I collected the card from them ASAP but I was in a dilemma whether my Casing would not be enough to shelter this new babe. Gosh! It didn't fit in my casing I mean i couldn't even insert it in to the casing. I had to lean one end of the card to the casing and then only I could insert the whole card in to the casing, oh forgot to tell you all, I had to remove one of my HDDs before inserting the VGA. After all the blah blah I powered up the PC, oh crap! nothing happens not even lights of the Casing.. Now I stated to curse the sales person who sold me my new PSU ( I thought the PSU was the culprit thinking it couldn't feed the beast with juice). Within next 10 seconds I remembered that there is a On/Off switch back of the PSU and it may have been switched-off accidentally since I played with the Casing for a while. Bingo! I was correct, that was the case, Phew!.

PC booted up normally and I installed the very drivers supplied by EVGA + the EVGA Precision Tool. From the researches I did before buying this card I knew I can't do even mere 100MHz on Mem of this card (though the mem is rated as 1ns). So I ended up at 960MHz on Mem (1000MHz gave artifacts so I straight away went back to 950 then 960 and didn't try any further; my laziness..lol) . The core clock bump wasn't extreme either but satisfying; 700MHz on core not bad eh? ( 600 stock)
Every game I had performed extremely well but Crysis was an exception, I don't have to explain about it right? you all know about Crysis. hehehe. It was a way too short game btw. More details and pictures will follow.. Stay tuned.lol

Now Playing: COD4..
Coming up next : FarCry2..

Tuesday, October 14, 2008

Windows 7 Stays as the Product's Final Name

Windows 7 is Microsoft's next client operating system. It will succeed the current release, Windows Vista. There has been some talk about whether the company would retain the name "Windows 7", which has been used so far, to refer to the OS, and it is the name that release candidates carry. Mike Nash, Vice President for Microsoft's Windows Product Management has confirmed in his recent blog post, that the OS retains the name "Windows 7", for its commercial release. Nash stated that since it's the seventh major release of the client OS, it would make sense calling it Windows 7.

Nash explained the thought behind not giving it a name based on its release date (eg. Windows 95/98) or using "aspirational monikers" (eg. Windows eXPperience/Vista), by saying that since the company doesn't release a new Windows version every year, and that using an aspirational name did not do justice to what they were trying to achieve. It made all the more sense caling it Windows 7, being the seventh release