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
Gamifying gameplay
For those unaware Raptr is a social website that allows gamers to track games and achievements but also to befriend each other. Well that is all I used it for after I switched to it from Xfire. There were some areas that allowed you to compare statistics against your friends but it’s wasn’t the main focus of the site.
However this all changed when Raptr recently got a huge make-over. Now for each of your games, play-time and achievements are ranked against the statistics of other players. The more people that are playing a game, the higher the thresholds of each ranking. The ranks are:
- Newbie
- Amateur
- Experienced
- Dedicated
- Hardcore
- Elite
Ranks, A brief overview
Raptr informs you of your ranking for a game and also tells you what is needed to reach the next rank. As an example I have 20 games where I am ranked as “Hardcore”, but I’m told that I need to invest another X hours gameplay or earning achievements to earn the rank “Elite”.
That’s all well and good but once you have put in the hours and become an “Elite” player of a title, what then? How does Raptr encourage you to put more time into a game?
Well it cleverly doesn’t tell you your exact rank, but it offer you the useful information on what step are needed for you to become the number #1 player of a game. The wonderfully designed message politely tells me that I need to invest another 58 hours in Sanctum to earn the elustrious title of the number #1 player.
The bonus is that you spend more time playing games that may have lost their enjoyment, but the grind doesn’t end there. As more players invest more time you will slowly lose position and maybe rank, another factor to push you into picking up older titles to in order to compete against other gamers and maintain your standing.
Standings
After the recent changes I was thrilled to discover that I am (at time of writing) the top ranked gamer for both Atomic City Adventures and Atom Zombie Smasher. On viewing my progress on the latter game it was apparent that I needed to put in a few more hours to try and earn more achievements to cement my place as top dog.
As I was typing this post I received an email from Audio Surf informing me that I had been dethroned as the top scorer on Transvision Vamps – Tell that girl to shut up.
C’est la vie d’une compétitif gamer.
*Should you want to add me as a friend on Raptr my username is welshtroll.
The Secret World : Pre-order
So yesterday saw the announcement about The Secret World (TSW) pre-order, on the surface it’s your standard MMO deals filled with common tactics designed to eke a little more cash from players. I have to admit that this is the first time I have seen the option to increase the number of character slots being offered during the pre-order phase.
The Basic game purchase is a usual £39.99 which has the normal 30 days playtime included, this is the option I shall be ordering this when pay-day rolls around. Pre-ordering grants the player the basic level of rewards
- Access to Beta Weekends
- Early Access (between 1 & 4 days headstart)
- Allows one name to be reserved effective now
- Experience buff ring (early levels)
- Unique T-shirt
- Pet that buffs combat (early levels)
Not a back mixture and will hopefully get peopling ordering the game super early to obtain some rewards.
But there are some other things can be also be purchased for an additional cost:
- The Initiate Pack (£12.49)
- Social Flying Pet
- Higher quality starter weapons
- Faction leather Jackets
- The Master Pack (£49.99)
- 30 days extra game time
- 1 extra character slot
- one additional name reservation
- 10% Lifetime discount on full-price store clothing items
- 10 Experience Buff potions (limited to account)
- 7 High end enhancements, to max out your toon early on
- The Grand Master
FlashPack (£159.99)- All of the content of the Master Pack
- Life-Time Subscription
- Snake Skin jacket
- Additional Character Slots (£8.49)
- Additional Name Reservations (£8.49)
In all honesty I wasn’t expecting to see the Lifetime subscription make an appearance for TSW, after many of the games who have opted such a feature have moved to a F2P/PaYG model. Despite having looked forward to this game for some time. I have reservations about purchasing a lifetime subscription in the pre-order.
I think the biggest problem for me is that investing that amount of money (almost £200) is hard to justify, when I could pick-up the £40 and between 12 and 13 months for the same price.
I think the biggest sticking point for me is that it requires a lot of blind faith that what you are purchasing will be enjoyable and keep my interest. Plus I’d hate to loose those 60 days free gaming time by getting the lifetime sub. 
I think I shall have to wait and see if the game is my cup of tea, and if I really want and they still offer it purchase it after launch.
