Orkut FTW 3: Suggest a gaming cpu withing 25k
Monday, April 14th, 2008Here’s the Featured Thread of the Week from the Tech Tonic community on Orkut.com
From the discussion it seems that AMD is once again on the radar of hard-core gamers with the new Phenom processor range. A recent AMD exec I met told me that folks there have decided to forget that there was a year 2007 and are moving on!
Most people though don’t seem to be very comfortable with the thought of slapping on ATI graphics cards and I don’t blame them. We’re still to see the fantastic synergies that the AMD takeover of ATI was supposed to herald. Maybe AMD should also acquire a high-end motherboard company and sell pre-packaged combos instead of getting people to opt for trial and error?
Coincidentally, I bought my first graphics card today. I’ve always messed around on test PCs and somehow never got around to buying a card for myself. The task was complicated by the fact that I have a slim cabinet which can only mount half-size metal plates. I scouted Lamington Road in Mumbai and was met by puzzled looks! Finally Gulbir of Prime ABGB gave us the right street lingo, asking his guys to rustle up a “low-profile card”. The highest-end low-profile they could muster was an XFX 8400 GS with 512 MB.
As you can see in the picture, the card itself is half-size but it’s still mounted on a full size metal plate. But on Lamington Road, nothing is impossible and soon someone found a ‘double half-plate’ with the exact same slots for the DVI and S-Video ports on one half-plate and an opening for the VGA port on the other one. All it took was a plier, a screwdriver and we were in business! I was stunned at how cheap this stuff has become - the XFX set me back by barely Rs. 2,300! It does pay to trail the technology adoption curve by about one generation!