What a Difference 128 Megs Makes!

Back in March I chronicled the creation of Mai, my computer. In it I had noted that my former tower, Alix2 had been so kind to donate her 8X AGP 128MEG video card. Well for the past few months it had been making weird noises... And being very weird myself, it takes something very weird for me to consider it weird.

Anyway, I was having a bitch of a time playing a couple of games. The graphics would lock up and all sorts of odd shit would happen. Plus, I have to be honest, I was getting really freakin' sick of nVidia anyway.

The new drivers wouldn't work with two of my games, Eve or Sim City 4. But the old drivers wouldn't work with Civilizations or Falcon 4.0! So after receiving $100 for Christmas from my wonderful grandparents I told the card to go fornicate its self and bought a 256MB ATI Radeon 9550 from circuitcity.com. I did the online ordering/store pick up thing (which is actually more hassle than its worth) and got it for 107$!

I was a little worried about this card. First off, it doesn't have a cooling fan, just a heat sync. And even though I don't know if I am ever going to get back into it, Eve put a LOT of strain on the video card because of all the 3-D stuff.

Secondly, I have been with nVidia all my life, so making the change scared me.

I have to say it was the most irrational fear of them all. I installed the card and I could tell a HUGE difference just by looking at the Windows desktop. It's so much sharper, it doesn't flicker, I can see more color definition... WOW!

Then I played Civilizations. HOLY SHIT! I was actually able to play the game and all the in game movies without the bastard crashing! WHEEEE! The detail of the maps and the units (who actually do a lot of movement, I just never noticed due to the screen freezing up) was unbelievable.

Finally I decided to play Falcon 4.0 (a combat flight simulator which is too complicated for me right now, but does have 3-D graphics). And I will be completely honest with you folks here. I really had the urge to masturbate after seeing the textures and 3-D aircraft models. I blew something up and it exploded in almost photo-realistic glory.

I almost think I was more amazed over how a simple 128 MB could make such a difference. I mean if I added 128 MB of system memory, I doubt it would speed things up much at all. But then again I think I was this impressed when I went from 64MB PCI to 128 MB AGP.

I can't wait till I get $1000. They had a 1 GB AGP card... Then again I am saving up for a 1 TB HDD (TB = Terabyte or 1,000 Gigabytes or 1,000,000 Megabytes) The unbelievable amount of anime and porn that could be stored on that drive is, well, unbelievable!

Woooooooooooo.