I found another blog webhost that doesn’t suck, so I will be enjoying blogging for until this one craps out. So without further ado…
A few days ago, my geforce fx 5900, which I had named Aries, was fried. It happened when I go thermal adhesive (which was somewhat conductive) on a part of the card that I shouldn’t have, thinking it was thermal grease (which isn’t adhesive or conductive, and not dangerous on the rest of the board). Thus, running my computer from my card resulted in a garbled display. Now I have been relegated to using my old, trusty ti4200, Cratos. Cratos has and most likely forever will be the best graphics card (in terms of performance vs price, and reliability) I have ever purchased, but I digress.
I first purchased Aries on ebay for $200 about a year and a half ago. I remember opening the big box and seeing the monster that it was. It stretched out to the hard drive bay in my computer case, and choked off any ventilation. I had to get a new case before I could do anything stressful to the card. Aries was not just a fast card, but it had the latest in pixel shader technology, which allowed me to activate special effects like mirrors in Max Payne 2 and bring Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic to it’s fulleset graphical capabilities. I remember the joy I felt running everything at a 1600x1200 resolution, with all the detail settings cranked to the max.
When I got my own computer a year later, and started 3D modeling, I soon realized that Cratos would not be fast enough, and took Areis out of my family’s computer and replaced it with an equally decent ATI card (since running an ATI card in Linux is near-impossible). Aries lived in there for some time. Then one of its fans started making a very annoying sound, and I purchased a new fan, some RAM heatsinks, and some thermal grease for it.
Little did I know that the “grease” was actually a conductive adhesive. Aries met an untimely fate due to my own oversight.
Rest In Peace, Aries. May your soul’s capacitors flow freely with energy wherever it may go.
Dude I’m so cool leaving a comment on my own blog… Just testing comments
Comment by Administrator — August 21, 2005 @ 7:56 am