Burned my video card out
This is more of a skew from finances to something else I deal with. One of my hobbies is video games and I also enjoy doing various things with my computer. When I built my current rig a little over a year ago, I kept my original video card because there was nothing wrong with it. That was an ATI Radeon 9600 256MB 128-bit DDR AGP card that I got for $103.99 shipped back in July 2004. Great investment considering the Geforce256 card I had prior to that cost me $300 and lasted 4 years! I pushed the life of the card (OC’d 459/213!) and all good things must come to an end though.
So here I stand needing a new video card. After debating some factors, primarily cost, along with the amount of power and heat my case can handle, I found something decent. Today I ordered an ATI Radeon X1650 512MB 128-bit GDDR2 AGP for $83.82 shipped. Crazy to think that a card many times more powerful than the one I have is actually $20 cheaper in today’s market. I’m surprised I could even find a nice AGP based card given that PCI Express has now changed the video card market. This will be the last video card upgrade I can do for the motherboard I bought last year because I’ll be forced to go the PCI-e route most likely next year.
The old video card I could continue to use as a simple display adapter for my other machine. It isn’t going to be much use for anything other than that because I think part of it is cooked. When video cards really heat up and don’t have a failsafe to shut them down, they melt.
It seems the latest and greatest games are really pushing the technology now and it is hard to make a safe investment in top of the line stuff. I’m willing to bet this card used to cost a lot of money initially, but now it is a step down into medium grade, it’s more affordable. I’ll stick to upgrading my stuff when I need to and try to make my stuff last as best I can.
System Specs (for those interested)
ASUS A8V, AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ (dual cores @ 2.2ghz), 2GB (2×1GB) PC3200 DDR RAM, Pioneer 16x DVD-R, Sony 52x CD/8x DVD, 120GB Maxtor IDE HD, 160GB WD IDE HD, 250GB WD SATA HD, and finally the ATI Radeon 9600 (dead) replaced by ATI Radeon X1650
