Wednesday, September 10

Geek

Close Enough For Pixy Work

The 9800GT works.  And yes, it's fast.  I don't have anything that will actually stress it at the moment, but for stuff that doesn't require a card like this, it's great.

Unlike the 6600, it doesn't automatically come up in dual-screen mode, so I had to download and install the drivers to get that working.  Except that the downloaded drivers didn't work at all - the installer insisted that I didn't have a compatible video card.

Back to the CD that came with the card.  That work, fortunately.  Only, while I was messing about trying to configure things correctly, I made a discovery - my two identical monitors have different brightness, contrast, and colour temperature levels when identical setttings are selected.  Not different enough to worry about, but at some point I'm going to spend an hour microtweaking until they are identical, goddammit!

Meanwhile, though, it works.  It works!

Update: Uh-oh.  Pale blue screen of beep-beep-beep!  Looks like my baby UPS can't power both computers any more, so I've taken the Windows box off it.  I think there was a power glitch when it overloaded and that caused the card to lock up, because it started beeping just afterwards.

Also, that card produces a fair whack of heat.  I have a 14cm case exhaust fan, but even so it's getting kind of warm in there.  Okay, I was playing a game on one screen and watching TV on the other, but I expect it to handle that without freaking out and falling over.  We'll see.

Update: The card comes with an overclocking utility, which also allows you to underclock it - and pretty drastically, if you so desire, right down to one quarter the default speed.  I've got it set to two-thirds right now, and I'm watching the temperature tick down.  We'll see how that goes over time.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:41 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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