I finally bit the bullet and opened one of my GTX 295 cards up for some PM. It's a lot less scary than I thought to do once I found some instructions on disassembly, but still took forever to do - making sure not to rush a single step. The stock Shin-Etsu paste was strong (and thick) with this...
You mean the card with SM2 vertex shaders but SM1.3 pixel shaders and with price/performance that basically made it dead-on-arrival? Yes. Also, surround gaming with CRTs and dongles!
https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/attack-blind-spot,482.html
Matrox had some innovative stuff here and...
That's amazing if these numbers are true. It'd definitely push me over the edge to do an upgrade. It certainly doesn't hurt that I already have someone I can sell my existing platform to, as well.
I kinda get it... Unboxing my *used* nVIDIA GPUs from the Titan X Pascal on have been a treat. The RTX 3080 FE I have now definitely has that "premium feel" in your hands. For as much as nVIDIA charged for it, though, it had god damn well better...
I may have posted this system 3 years ago but I didn't get a whole lot of time to play around with it. Today, I remedy that. Just need to figure out where I put the optical drives for it and install drive cables...
The GeForce 9800 GX2, yes. There was also a 7900 GX2 that was OEM only, and a consumer 7950 GX2 as well. The card that followed the 9800 GX2 is behind it: the GeForce GTX 295. :cool:
My personal favorite?
The nVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT 512MB. It was the first GPU that allowed me to turn everything to max settings in the shader model 3 era. And it was the last enthusiast grade single-slot GPU from nVIDIA.
Apologies if I've already posted. Disregard the old one if I have.
I don't need a top tier CPU, no, considering my GPU is a 3080 FE (which is listed in my signature) - and later this year I'll be swapping it for a 3080 Ti FE. I'll be doing a good deal of video encoding and 3D modeling in addition to gaming and streaming, so the extra cores will come in handy...