Sunday, December 5, 2010

The Sound of Silence

My graphics card has been dieing a slow and rather noisy death - or, at least, the fan has been. Last night, the way it was acting up, I decided that it's final death was probably imminent and that it should be replaced as soon as possible.

Now, I've been putting off replacing it for a few months or so now because getting a new graphics card necessitates upgrading my PC's power supply as it's a lowly 300W and most new-ish graphics cards seem to require at least 400W. This increases the cost of replacing my ailing graphics card (approximately doubling the cost, depending on power supply/graphics card) and, as a student on a limited budget, I have been hesitant to spend the money to upgrade even though it was fairly obvious that I would have to sooner or later.

However! I recently received word that a funding application my supervisor and I put in over the summer was approved so now I have some confirmed funding for next year, and a decent amount more than what I've been getting to date. Thus, I decided now was the time to go ahead and upgrade. I went out today and bought myself a new graphics card (Radeon 5670, for the curious) and a 700W power supply. And it's so quiet! I can barely hear anything at all! It's so wonderful.

I also noticed, whilst I was buying the new graphics card, that there were some 24" widescreen Samsung LCD monitors on sale ($70 off) so I decided to pick one of those up as well as I've been kind of itching to upgrade my monitor. Yeah, I'm splurging. But it's worth it! The new monitor is so glorious! I'm running at a resolution of 1920x1080 and everything is crisp and smooth. It's freaking fantastic!

That is all,
-Freak Out

No comments: