New Second Hand Graphics Card

I tend to postpone upgrading my computers until it either breaks down or it gets too cramped in performance/memory/etc. This tends to take a long time.

So a colleague of mine was upgrading his computer, and I managed to get his old graphics cards.

Seeing as I am on a budget, I was looking into what the difference in performance were for second hand graphics cards.

A lot of graphics cards are replaced because there are better ones, even though the old cards still work perfectly fine.

And he just happens to buy the latest and greatest, which is still a pretty good deal after 7 years, compared to what I buy.

My original graphics card

It's a AMD Radeon HD 5700 Series.

"New" graphics card

It's a Nvidia GeForce 770.

Notes

Some notes of mine.

type

you cannot tell any more what kind of graphics card it is from just looking at the physical hardware. With any luck you can find the manufacturer, but that's it. There's just not more room or not important.

external connectors

So, no more VGA connector. And of course my old monitor only has a VGA Connector. (Don't ask, I'll write about it in the next blog about how ancient it is). It gave me an excuse to upgrade my monitor.

internal power cable for PCI Express cards

The old graphics card had only one internal power connector, a 6 pin. The new graphics card had both a 6 pin and an 8 pin. Time to look in the attic for my spare cables box.

noise

it's rather depressing that the new graphics card has three fans and is more quiet than my old graphics card which has only one fan.

heaviness

with all the fans, and the cooling fins, this new graphics card is a seriously heavy beast in pure weight. I hope my motherboard can cope with it.

plastic

instead of screws, my case has plastic easy-to-use click-and-go thingies to fasten cards. Of course, plastic is the first thing to become brittle after several years. No surprises there.

All in all, I am extremely happy. Except for a few little surprises mentioned above, I had the entire setup working relatively quickly.

References

NVidia - GeForce GTX 770

https://www.geforce.com/hardware/desktop-gpus/geforce-gtx-770/specifications

My wife's new labtop

Well, World of Warcraft has once again got its hooks into me. I plan on reactivating my account. Ever since the proclamation from Blizzard that World of Warcraft Classic is going to be actively developed, I've got the itch.

My wife would like to play as well, but our labtop, though working fine, is having trouble if the settings are higher than 0.

So, the search for an entry level gaming labtop on a tight budget was on!

As I have no experience with buying labtops or computers on a regular basis, time to do some research.

I decided, for an entry level gaming labtop videocard, to shoot for the NVidia GTX 960M or the NVidia GTX 1050.

I hear the processor is not the most interesting/important part of gaming, so a 7th generation i5 would be fine.

Memory is also not that important, as long as it is at least 8 Gigabytes. I do hope to be able to upgrade this, when I decide to do some software development on said labtop.

An SSD is a very nice to have, otherwise you end up on loading screens that take a while in any serious multi-gigabyte game.

brand	type	proccessor	video (mem)	hdd/ssd	mem/max
Asus RoG	RoG GC533VW-FY079T	i7 6700HQ	960M (2gb)	hdd	8/16
MSI	6L62M 7RDX-1267NL	i5 7300HQ	1050 (2gb)	hdd/ssd	8/32
Acer Nitro	AN515-51-5048	i5 7300HQ	1050 (4gb)	hdd/ssd	8/32
Lenovo	Legion Y520-15LBKN-80WK00Q4mh	i7 7700HQ	1050 (2gb)	hdd/ssd	8/16
Asus RoG	6L502VM-FY479T	i7 7700HQ	1060	hdd/ssd	8/16
HP	Pavilion Power 15-cb001nd	i5 7300HQ	1050 (2gb)	hdd/ssd	8/16

We decided on the HP, also because my wife's company sells it and we can get a (small) discount.

I would have liked to go for a Republic of Gamers (RoG) labtop, pure for the novelty value and the design, but alas it was not to be.

Originally my wife had something in mind around the 700 euro price tag, but we failed miserably in that category. These gaming labtops start from 899 euros and up.