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
New things
Well as I promised myself a new toy after i left work.
Well it arrived today my small yet practical eee pc from ASUS,
I've had a play around with it for the last few hours and here are my thoughts.
Now this isn't going to run call of duty 4 or any heavy software, but then it isn't meant too.
The product box is very small, it was quite exciting to open, there really isn't alot inside, the PC battery and power supply.
Now one element that I have always liked about the EEE is that the power pack is small, there's no large transformer that need to be hauled arund everywhere, infact it reminds me of phone chargers from a few years back.
The keyboard is small but not that back to be honest, takes a little while to adjust to using it but after the first couple of mistakes your find it naturally is easy to use.
The screen size isn't super-wide or with vista style graphics, but it is big enough to display everything you need to interact with.
The built in wireless was quick to setup although I was slightly confused at first, things could have been a little clearer.
But in all I couldn't be happier with it and having a lightwight laptop to take with me is a better prospect that carting my other laptop about.
Well thats it for now, more to follow soon.
No iPhone thanks
Well it seems the iPhone is a big hit, after a month or so of continued hype, It came and went.
Yes it look impressive and is slick and stylish, but to me the whole item just screams accident waiting to happen.
OK so I'm not the carefulist of owners when I comes down to devices. It's safe to say that each of my phones i've purchase have encountered 'parking bruises' within the first week.
It generally tends to get worse from there.
For me to be interested in a brand new phone, it would need to be combined with a G-Shock and be heavy duty, something simple and easy to use, but that could with-stand being owned by me for a week.
