Solo Technology

I bought a new video card last week. An AGP video card. For those wondering why I mention AGP: that’s a lot like buying a new VCR for the home entertainment system. AGP is the old standard, largely replaced by PCI-E. However, I’m not ready (nor have the need) to build a new PC quite yet… so there you go. I’m still running old school.

It has been a long time since I last bought a brand new video card! Many years, actually. I think the last one I bought new was a GeForce 4200ti. Those things were stout little cards, weren’t they? I used a series of those for most of this decade, in fact.

The card that replaced it was an ATI 9600 (pro or XT? can’t recall now) card that some EverQuest friends had outgrown and donated. I got a lot of mileage out of it until the next donation card came my way a few years later– a GeForce 6800 GT. That one was strong and well above what I’d consider paying for a card, but flawed. As mentioned in several posts from last year, it had dire heating issues. Sure, I’d been warned by the prior owners, but most of the time it worked fine — I wasn’t gaming much anymore.

I’m gaming again now, though (still having fun with EverQuest 2). The 6800 now constantly over-heats. The loaner FX 5200 sucked, so I sucked it up and bought a new card. For just under $100 (shipped) I now have a GeForce 7600 GS.

I like it. It doesn’t heat up the office like the 6800 did, so that’s a big plus right off the bat. I wish I could’ve compared it a bit to the 6800, but for my purposes it seems pretty similar.

At first I wasn’t overly excited about some of the graphic quality in game though. Tonight it finally hit me that I couldn’t remember the last time I updated video drivers! Oops. The last 3 cards have all been GeForce flavors, so I wasn’t really worrying about that and was just swapping the hardware around.

After the driver upgrade, I was poking around in the NVIDIA control panel and found that it seems to have some presets for a bunch of games, including EQ2. Not sure if it is those presets or just the much newer drivers, but things are much better in game — smoother and I could crank out the distance plane a bit more.

So yeah, I kinda feel like I just bought a new 8-track player for the car stereo… but I don’t care — I can play!

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