BTAFX Now that's the short form of Better Tha A Fucking XBox. I finally got my new graphics card, an nVidia 9800 GTX (512). Well , this card has travelled a long, a really long way to finally power up my rig. Kudos !! to my friend who got this one for me. Costs around 5900 bucks from tigerdirect. The first thing I realized was that I was missing one of these: Surprisingly these were not packaged along with the card bundle so I had to run around the city (Hyderabad, where I am staying) to lookfor one of these. Finally I ended up at CTC Secundarabad. Its Hyderabad's own flavor of the Delhi's Nehru Place. So after looking around and speaking to intelligent idiots (the shopsellers) I figured out that the existsing supply on my mobo wasnt enough to produce enough juice for this 1 feet giant. Oops I think I forgot to mention, its about a feet long So finally I decided that there wasnt really a way to save any more money and just go and get a new power supply for this monster. There were not many options for SMPS offering 600W+ of power. Few vendors were: Gigabyte, CoolerMaster, Entranche. Finally after a little bit of hagging with the vendor I decided to go in for the Enterage SMPS, burns a hole of about a 3 grand. Its an Indian brand and so the lower costs, but considering that the Gigabyte was 4-5k, I think this one made sense. So finally I came back to my appt. sipped a coke and started to put the thing in its place. And here's how it looked finally:





Perf: The card delivers what it promises. I took a day off from my work just to settle my curiosity with this card and I guess it was well worth the effort :).

GRID: 1440x900 + Ultra + 4XFSAA = 50 FPS (Yeah!!) Looks stunning and no way this game can beat the card.

Gears of War: 1440x900 + Max + 4xFSAA (30-40 fps) The look and feel of the game changed radcially once the rig was on. There were lots of effects which werent visible previously and came to life all of a sudden.

Crysis: 1440x900 + Mainstream + NO FSAA (30 fps) Go crysis!!!. Once again its crysis bringing the card down on its knees. The machine seems to have been tortured on this run. Crysis has long been famous for its ridiculously high graphics requirements and this time it proves it as well. COD4: Didnt get time to check this one out as of now.

NFS: I have stopped playing NFS since the time I have fallen in love with GRID. But yeah this would work fine. Anyways people playing NFS can run it on a scientific calculator then whats the need to buy such an expensive device :)

My config as of Tuesday May 19th, 2008
AMD x2 4400+ 750 GB HDD 2 GB Corsair 667 Mhz nVidia geForce 9800 GTX Enterage 750W Power Supply

Cheers
Bagga