I wrote a couple of times about my videocard being fried after the fan (probably worth less than a buck) died on it. It was a MSI nVdia Geforce FX5600 with 256mb of ram on it. It was not the worst card, but it was not good either: when running Doom3 for instance, it would slow down to about 10fps. With other games, it was just mediocre. After replacing the faulty fan with a new copper fan (that cost me € 19,-) it first would not fix the garbled video, but for some weird reason after 1 day it did. So I was happy with that. However, this Thursday it started messing up again (garbled 3D) and no matter what I tried, it would not go away: time to get me another videocard.
So the last 3 weeks or so, I upgraded my PC with another 512mb of ram, totaling 1gig. I also spent some money on getting a new fan (that did not solve the heating problem for good) and a new power supply (another €45). And now I was faced with shelling out some more money for a videocard. Off course the question would be: how much do I want to spend on it. A high end videocard would be about 300 to 400 Euro’s. Off course I do not have the money for that.
Luckily I buy a lot off computer magazines and the test a lot of new hardware. My aim would be to buy the cheapest videocard with the best performance. Now, prices on for instance the ATI Radeon 9800 Pro have dropped to about 200 Euro’s. And a long time the 9800 Pro beat the competition (nVidia) hands down. But as I studied the articles and online sources, it turned out that there is a new videocard out that has a very good price/performance: the nVidia Geforce 6600 GT. It is about the same price as a Radeon 9800 Pro, but, so it seems, beats it in the tests.
For a while though, it was only available in PCIe (the new standard that replaced AGP 8x). But a few months ago the first AGP versions started to appear. Since the AGP version only seems to perform about 10% less than the PCIe version, and prices are around 220 Euro, It seemed a good choice. So I started to search websites for stores near me that sold this card.
Oddly enough, the store closest to me, Vi Computers, was the cheapest, so I head out and went in to get me one. Funny enough they had only 1 left. A Leadtek Winfast A6600 GT TDH – now there is a mouthful. The box said € 229,- but on their website it said € 219,- so I got it for that price. Still, it is the most expensive videocard I ever bought: it was almost 490 Guilders (I hate the Euro).
Now the question is: did my investment pay of? Well I can only say one thing: hell yeah! This card rocks! If you want to see how good it is, you can download this little tool called FRAPS that shows you your FPS and also allows you to make screencaptures, video’s etc. of your game. With Half Life 2 on highest settings at 1024×768 I run some comfortable 112-55 fps. Again this is with AA and the works on! This game never looked better!
I will post some screenshots soon. I have just got to play some more games!