Got myself a GTX650Ti

So I gifted myself a new VGA just in time for the new year. The aged 9800GT died on me few months back so I had no gaming life during the past months so to speak. Oh btw I got a PlayStation2 from a friend of mine and had some fun with it. The old 9800GT was 4 years+ old but still had some kick left in it, but it died and I had to get a new one. Local prices were absurd as usual and a Geforce 650 was around 20K, a GTX 650Ti would set you back a hefty 27K+.

Luckily Anusha  asked me if I want to get one from Japan when he comes to SL in December. So I checked few japanese online stores and opted to get a GTX650Ti made by Palit for JPY11,380 which was roughly equivalent to LKR18,000. That marks it as my 6th encounter with nVidia and I'm yet to buy any ATi/AMD card. Does that make me an nVidia Fanboy ?? :)

One fine Wednesday I met Anusha and got the card from him, oh and I had to bug him to check the card for DOA when he got it from Japan. We had a small mishap with money where I had given him less than the promised amount, managed to solve it but the embarrassment is still there :)

Plugged the card and did the routine installations and voila! Everything is fine. Now I had FarCry3 and Most Wanted pre-installed :) , cranked to max possible graphics quality on FarCry3 and it delivered near 30FPS (@1366x768) during the opening scene, not to say it is playable but still being on a 5 years old CPU ( E6750 overclocked to 3GHz) that is decent. Anyways had to lower some options here and there (specially SSAO) to get it to play at a smooth frame rate. One thing I noticed in FarCry3 was even at 30FPS the game play is nowhere near smooth as it would with Call Of Duty. So some sacrifices with the graphics quality had to be made.

The card is dead silent while sitting at idle and is much much cooler than my old card. To give you some perspective, the 9800GT sat around 58-60C with the fan @ 100% speed, while the 650Ti manages to do away with less than 40C, and that is with the fan @ 35% (Auto). I always had the 9800GT fan at full throttle to avoid any unnecessary overheating.

This was the significant gadget(PC) purchase I did in 2 years so "the itch" to get a new gadget is resisted for few months to come :)

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..