Netster 宅男

My pre­cious! Damn, this card is expen­sive! My GeForce 8500GT stop work­ing last month and I have no choice I need a card to power my HTPC while wait­ing for the war­ranty claim. With­out much thought I bought a new card right there and than. I won­der if this is a mar­ket­ing gim­mick – You return a card and at the same time you have to pur­chase a new one!

I use to think that hav­ing high end card on a HTPC is wast­ing money and resources, I like to take it back! :p it’s so big dif­fer­ent! Hav­ing high end Nvidia 8 series on HTPC is totally kick ass! Too bad I’m no gamer at all but I will wait for the new GTA to appre­ci­ate the adren­a­line rush. (I love fast car on screen! LOL)

As soon as I fire up the card, one notice­able improve­ment was the card is light­ing fast! I can change my TV chan­nel on Win­dows Media Cen­ter much quicker. Time shift­ing & record­ing is totally smooth sail­ing, lesser noise, the color is sharper and eyes pleas­ing. Ah! My HTPC is one expen­sive toy with qual­ity vitamin.

I set up my HTPC with duo screen dis­play. One at a dis­play res­o­lu­tion of 1680 x 1050 and another at 1280 x 1024 on a sin­gle card by con­nect­ing my wide screen View­Sonic 20.1 incher and Sam­sung Syn­Mas­ter 192T 19 incher via 2 DVI on the card. So far there’s no con­flict, ASUS EN8800GT han­dle both dis­play res­o­lu­tions simul­ta­ne­ously with solid per­for­mance. (The screen maybe off should game changes res­o­lu­tion dur­ing start up – hap­pen only on old PC games)

ASUS didn’t bun­dle that much of stuffs for all their cards release, keep­ing price low and stay in com­pe­ti­tion maybe two of the rea­son or they just try­ing to cut cost. For this card how­ever, in my opin­ion, con­sumer maybe con­sider lucky to have extra goody – ASUS CD holder! LOL (see box above)

Here are the down points

1. Not much of info pro­vided on the hand book or on the box about this card. I have many Nvidia cards and I think Lead­tek did bet­ter job in pro­vid­ing instal­la­tion instruc­tion and card specifications.
2. Very expen­sive but this is to be expected on all high end card! Even mid range is still a bit too pricey!
3. NO HDMI port. You still can use the con­verter for future proof but I guess, again it just another silly mar­ket­ing gim­mick to push more money out of con­sumer for their 9 Series cards.
4. When Win­dows Media Cen­ter on full screen, one other screen become use­less. NVIDIA or MS should fix this part through their soft­ware. This error or lim­i­ta­tion is con­sumer great­est loss of pro­duc­tiv­ity. (you can fix this prob­lem by not turn­ing on full screen, silly I know, that’s how it goes)
5. ASUS own soft­ware is bad for eyes sight, Bad UI but usable. I do not rec­om­mend this soft­ware on Vista – crash and error to be expected. (Since most of you guys OC your rig on XP sys­tem, you should have less trou­ble. I hate it, the soft­ware just look ugly on Vista!)
6. NVIDIA is focus­ing more on 9 series card. You may now be in dilemma and caught in the wait­ing games for lower price on high end card which prob­a­bly will not hap­pen! It was never hap­pen on 7 series card and it will not hap­pen on 8 series and def­i­nitely will not on 9 series.

What I like most about the card

1. Big! The card is so big! Same rea­son you drive a big car. The big­ger the bet­ter, psy­cho­log­i­cally! (LOL)
2. High end card! Sup­port PCI-Express 2.0! HDTV-out, DVI x 2, HDCP com­pli­ant and most of all…
3. 512MB DDR3
4. PCIe 2.0
5. The card is powerful!

	GeForce 8800 Ultra	GeForce 8800 GTX	GeForce 8800 GTS	GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB1	GeForce 8800 GT	GeForce 8800 GS
Stream Proces­sors	128	128	96	128	112	96
Core Clock (MHz)	612	575	500	650	600	550
Shader Clock (MHz)	1500	1350	1200	1625	1500	1375
Mem­ory Clock (MHz)	1080	900	800	970	900	800
Mem­ory Amount	768MB	768MB	640MB or 320MB	512MB	512MB	384MB
Mem­ory Interface	384-bit	384-bit	320-bit	256-bit	256-bit	192-bit
Mem­ory Band­width (GB/sec)	103.7	86.4	64	64	57.6	38.4
Tex­ture Fill Rate (billion/sec)	39.2	36.8	24	41.6	33.6	26.4

Here’s a snip­pet of Tom Clancy’s Splin­ter Cell Chaos The­ory game. I have DX10 game, Com­pany of Heroes but my video record­ing of the games was not to my lik­ing so I am not going to show you. Splin­ter Cell Chaos The­ory how­ever, caught my eyes after I have updated the game’s patch. Trust me, I have this game for a very long time, I never play em’

I am NVIDIA slave! I have bought many of them, from 4th series – 8th series. Strangely and luck­ily I’ve skipped 7 Series or else I will have almost all of GeForce and be made amuse­ment! (Actu­ally I’m already there! LOL)

2004, This is ASUS V9180 SE GeForce 4 MX 440 card (below), my very first GeForce 4 card. This card marks the first time I assem­ble my own hybrid PC. (I don’t really under­stand why peo­ple call it a clone PC – so if a PC wasn’t Dell or Toshiba or branded PC is a “Clone”?) In fact this is my very first HTPC. HTPC is my only source of enter­tain­ment watch­ing 8TV when I was work­ing in Kuala Lumpur and stay in a rented room.

2005, Galaxy Zeus 5200 although I have been using my HTPC for some “long” time, I did not bother to buy mid range card. I still stick with entry level card which really seem to enough for my DVD experience.

2006, Win­Fast A6600 GT TDH 20th anniver­sary Lim­ited Edi­tion is my very first mid range card! This card packed with 2 games Tom Clancy’s Splin­ter Cell Chaos The­ory & Prince of Per­sia War­rior Within. This card is not cheap! It cost me bloody RM540! Just because it say spe­cial edi­tion and I bought the card *grin*

2007, Last but not least my mid range 8 series from Giga­byte. I have to get this card due to my new moth­er­board work only with PCI express. Since all of my dis­play cards are AGP ver­sion, it also spelled the end of it shelf life! This card is obso­lete, killed by full swing pro­duc­tion of socket 775 platform.

Any one seen my “Warham­mer 40000: Dawn of War — Dark Cru­sade?” I think I’ve mis­place it! Bummer!

Every liv­ing thing has it time and so do all none liv­ing thing! But mis­place it before los­ing it is pathetic! *sign*

2008, please refer to my topic I know I’m get­ting bet­ter and bet­ter with dis­play card over time. I think I’ve learn so much over the years. If you have cross expe­ri­ence between ATI and GeForce, please do let me know your opin­ion about both cards strength/weaknesses and why you love them. If you lazy to type, oh well…

oOo ^_^ oOo Thanks for reading!

The only games that I fond of play­ing is Car rac­ing other than that I won’t really take time to appre­ci­ate it. I am not a gamer but nice & rugged gam­ing rig is my choice!

Rugged Chas­sis

This is my new cas­ing; I bought it in Feb­ru­ary 23rd. I am look­ing for a case that has a qual­ity build for proper cool­ing. Due to pric­ing fac­tor I have cho­sen this mid tower to replace my exist­ing cas­ing. I wish I could afford to buy Antec P182SE Advanced Super Mid Tower — Mir­ror Look, oh well!

My Giga­byte 8500GT dis­play card stop work­ing last month (card less than 6 month old) and this prompted me to bet­ter buy a case that has suf­fi­cient fans to cool the sys­tem. I think I would try to get a water cool­ing sys­tem in the future.

For now this is my new toy, still in the box.

The Box

Smilodon Inte­rior

Side Panel

Hard Drive Fan

Dis­play Card’s Fan

Good nite, guys! (sleepy)

It’s been 2 weeks since my last thought of installing my 320GB West­ern Dig­i­tal WD3200AAKS on to my HTPC. I bought the hard drive on Octo­ber 19 and it still in a wrap­per semi naked with sticker tagged on it. It’s really pain in the ass More

I would like to thank god for giv­ing me the strength to be able to really buy a new sys­tem… amen! (LOL) I really do get my self a super new sys­tem! New and lat­est chipsets! Thank god for mak­ing my heart pump­ing over new tech­nol­ogy, I just couldn’t help myself.

First, I got myself Core 2 Duo proces­sor which is still very new in mar­ket with 65nm in tech­nol­ogy (although Intel will soon launch 45nm next year or so). With this new proces­sor I can do more now with my HTPC! Accord­ing to Intel, these proces­sors sup­ports Intel® Vir­tu­al­iza­tion Tech­nol­ogy (Intel® VT)± and cur­rently still in the devel­op­ment. This is going to be exciting.

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