DailyTech got their hands on the new G80 from Nvidia, and evidently it cooks. Aging gamers like me can only hope it drives the cost of last-gen cards down a little bit, so I can play Railroad Tycoon and X-com with 4x AA. Anyhoo, here’s the link to the article. It cooks – about 50% quicker than an X1950, and it’s loaded up with 768MB of DDR3. There’s speculation that with the two SLI connectors, and Nvidia’s announcement of the new 680i and 650i chipsets (which feature three PCI Express x16 slots), this card will be capable of triple SLI.
Archive for the 'Video Cards' Category
Earlier today, Zach posted about updating drivers for various NVidia Go cards and the frustration that usually comes along with that process. All notebook manufacturers who use these cards generally provide an ‘optimized’ driver that works well with the card and plays nice with the rest of the system. In many cases though, these drivers can hinder the capabilities of your card. And in almost all cases, updates are non-existant.
Case-in-point… I own a Dell Inspiron 8200 (yeah, I need to upgrade). When this machine was new back in 2003, it was bleeding edge and came with the quickest mobile video card on the market, the GeForce4 440 Go. As time went by, there were updates to many of the ‘official’ drivers for this machine, but there was only ever 1 ‘official’ video driver. This driver was released in April of 2003 and to give you some idea of how old these drivers are, NVidia still called them “Detonator” drivers and they were at version 42.58. Even today, this is the only video driver that Dell offers for this card/machine.
Continue reading ‘Additional NVidia GeForce Go Card Drivers’
Some of you with laptops using NVidia’s various Go chipsets will understand the frustration involved when trying to update to the latest drivers. My laptop, a Toshiba Tecra M2 with discrete GeForce Go5200 graphics, is a decent little gamer at the KOTOR/Guild Wars/Quake 3 level. The problem is that Toshiba’s latest driver update is for version 46.44 of the NVidia drivers, and NVidia doesn’t support a unified driver architecture for most Go cards.
Well, here’s the fix. The guys over at LaptopVideo2Go have a hacked inf file you can use to update your laptop graphics drivers. What this does, basically, is remove the restriction from installing the drivers so you don’t get this error message:
nVidia setup program could not locate any drivers that are compatible with your current hardware. Setup will now exit.
Here’s a link back to the thread with instructions for making the update:
ForceWare Updater’s Quickstart Guide
Gotta thank guys like that for keeping laptop gaming good, even on hardware that’s a little bit older.
It has now been almost 3 weeks since I tore my machine down to upgrade. While in the middle of that operation, and much to my dismay, I found that the video card I had ordered was an AGP card and not PCIX as I had apparently assumed (Doh!). Well, my new MSI 6800 video card arrived today so it’s time to try again. I ended up just choking down the $200 and going with a real live 6800 this time. It would have been nice to jump to the GT, but I don’t have that kinda cash.
I will be installing my new card in the next couple days and benchmarking many games with it. It will be interesting to see how much difference I notice when playing games like Half-Life II and Guild Wars where I was already playing them at 1280 x 1024 with 2xAA. That said, it’s hard to let the old 5900XT go. It was a great card and served me well as all technology should slave away for the pleasure of mankind.
If you’re interested, it’s up on eBay now and will be sent to a loving new home where the new owner will enjoy many hours of fantastic fun-ness whilst playing violent brain-rotting drivel. I take absolutely no responsibility for the nagging and complaints the new owner will have to endure due to spending far too many hours in front of the computer.
You can view the auction HERE.
Well, so much for the Geforce 6800LE idea. I’m sure it would have worked had we read the specs for the cards before we ordered them. Turns out, they only make that card in an AGP form factor (which was clearly stated on the Newegg item page had we taken the time to read it). It sucks to figure that out half-way through a build though. So now my poor machine sits in a state of partial assembly till we can get the new cards sent out. What’s worse is that the Chaintec boards we decided to go with will not boot with a PCI video card. For some stupid reason they require that a PCI-express card be installed before they will even boot. The boards do support a PCI card as a secondary display adapter, but not without a PCI-X card installed as well. AAAARRRRRRGH!!!
Well, I suppose it’s my own fault for assuming. Cause we all know what happens when you assume…
Hopefully I won’t have to wait too long for my new MSI 6600GT card to arrive, but at least I can play Guild Wars on my laptop till then =)
Well, the 64 bit processing age is upon us, so I guess it’s finally time to take the plunge. I’ve been holding off in the hopes of jumping to dual core, but when the fair mistress Opportunity knocks on the door, I seem to be too weak to turn her away.
As it happens, Zach and I have been presented with an opportunity to upgrade so we decided to go for it. Now, my current system isn’t really THAT out of date. The following is the heart of my current system:
Athlon XP 3000+ (Barton core)
MSI K7N2 Delta NForce2 Ultra board
512mb Dual Channel 3200 DDR Ram
MSI GeForce FX 5900XT
This baby runs Half Life 2 like a champ at 1280×1024 with 2x AA. The only thing I’ve ever really thrown at it that it had a hard time with was Doom 3 so…
