Zotac GTX 560
Around Christmas time I had come into a little money and decided to upgrade from my Gainward GTX 260 1792MB GS to something newer. Despite being rather old my GTX 260′s only limitations were the lack of DX11 support and newer high-end games (Battlefield3 and Skyrim) needed to have the graphical distance reduced a little along with the quality. This wasn’t currently a big problems but I knew that with bigger games on the horizon the card was going to start suffering.
It had been sometime since I investigated graphic cards in any depth so I had a bit of investigation to learn about the newer card. I’ve been an Nvidia fan for some time now, but I didn’t immediately discard ATI/AMD cards but from the experience of friends and online reports about the drivers swayed me from AMD cards once more.
I never favour the high-end/bleeding edge cards, mostly as the cost is beyond what I’m comfortable paying and as with most things I like to purchase hardware that has been tried, tested, tweaked and offers the best in a category. The Zotac card was getting some good reviews and the differences between the 560 and the 570 were mainly in the price, with fractional differences in performance.
The first card I received was fine for the first 3 weeks but then I started seeing artefacts in Skyrim. I did the usual strip down of my machine and temperature checks and confirmed the problems was likely to be with the card. Swapping back to my original card verified this
I say that in all the year I have used online websites to purchase electronic items this was the first time I had ever needed to evoke a returns process. Thankfully the returns policy at Ebuyer is rather well documented and pretty easy to follow.
A replacement Card was dispatched within a week and my graphic returned to their previous DX11 glory.
ZOTAC GeForce® GTX 560 Ti 448 Cores – Limited Edition
Model : Model ZT-50313-10M
Interface : Interface PCI Express 2.0 x16 (Compatible with 1.1)
Chipset : Chipset Manufacturer NVIDIA®GPU GeForce® GTX 560 Ti
Core clock 765 MHz
Stream Processors 448
Shader Clock 1530 MHz
Memory : Memory Clock 3800 MHz
Memory Size 1280 MB
Memory Interface 320-bit
Memory Type GDDR5
DirectX : DirectX 11
OpenGL : OpenGL 4.2
Ports : DVI 2 (DVI-I) / HDMI 1/ DisplayPort 1
RAMDAC : 400 MHz
Max Resolution : 2560 x 1600
Kindling
What with the announcements of new Kindles galore, I suddenly realised that I have never really mentioned my Kindle on here. It arrived as an unexpected birthday present, secretly plotted by my wife, a gift that one that I now consider one of the most useful and entertaining ever.
I take it most places and generally fit in some reading each day, whether it is on the bus journey to work or during
my lunch break.
I have to admit I was nervous of adopting the Kindle in favour of paper-based products, but I really do enjoy the flexibility it offers.
Whatever my mood I can find a book to suit and it’s certainly easier than carting a number of books around in your bag.
I think that samples functionality is great, allowing you to browse the Amazon site for books & send samples of those that interest you to your Kindle.
Samples allow you to expand your reading landscape without having to spend anything, they are a great way to find new authors, genres or forgotten favourites.
Owning a Kindle causes a number of odd things to happen:
- Random people will just start talking to you about books, not
always a bad thing. - People who are interest in Kindles expect you to try and sell the product too them, very odd lines of questioning.
- Other Kindle owners seem to only read free books, you feel like the only one purchasing books.
- I read things that I’ve not bothered to pick-up before now
- Visiting WH Smiths & Waterstones become an exercise of picking out title you may like for later.
- People expect it to be a touch screen and I laugh.
Many people still seem uncertain about buying Kindle, they seem to see it as a question of Kindle or new [Insert Pad Device Here], with the new Kindle (without keyboard) is bringing the device closer to peoples price range, I hope to see more family and friends with one.
In my experience it?s changed my reading habits for the better, even if it?s a little pricier due to the VAT being charged for online books (except when you notice how they compare to hardback prices on new
releases).
PC Upgrade
We’ll I’ve finally got my new hard drives installed with a fresh version of XP too.
My old SATA discs were a little old and both had snapped the plastic support for the data cable off. This meant they were a little flaky at times and the one drive hadn’t work for the last 3 months.
I planned on cloning the OS and migrating the whole lot over to the new discs this would have been fine, only due too my partitions things weren’t going to be so easy.
Happily I have discovered that there are 2 great benefits to how I game.
MMOs – all my mmo games that I moved over worked off the bat, which is rather good considering their size and the potential downloading that could have been required to re-install them. (LoTRo was a game that didn’t like this last upgrade but It wasn’t installed this time around)
Steam – Horrah for Steam, well nearly. You see my steam installation wasn’t exactly the same as the one described in the Steam Knowledge base. They assumed my steamapps folder was under the main steam folder (steam\steamapps) when in fact it was located at steam\config\steamapps.
This resulted in a bit of a headache because moving the apps folder to that new location resulted in Steam not loading up. But after some trial and error I found that I needed to boot Steam up without the apps folder and it would be created, then keep the files that it generated as they held the correct path. A little awkward but worth it as downloading 43GB of game data wasn’t as appealing as you’d think.
So I’ve now got my shiny Christmas presents installed and a massive 500gb Free 
