Octopus Overlords

A GTX 260 to a GTX 770 seemed like a bigger jump than i remember. then while looking for the cable I found my broken GTX 560. The fans died on it and it toasted itself good. Shame I cant use it now.

Daehawk wrote: ↑Mon Feb 05, 2018 7:22 am A GTX 260 to a GTX 770 seemed like a bigger jump than i remember. then while looking for the cable I found my broken GTX 560. The fans died on it and it toasted itself good. Shame I cant use it now.

I still have a GTX 580 in the second windows computer, that I bought used. Still works and the last time I looked was still better performing than anything under $250-300 (Canadian).

Had to just now order a DVI-D DL cable for this 260 so i can use 2560x1080 which is my native res. i cant read the text on anything. But the card is already struggling with my games so at that res Im sure it will stall lol.

Stupid pc repair stores here no longer sell anything. they used to sell anything you needed back in the 90s and most of the 2000s. Not now.

Im not sure why EVGA is saying I have a 3 year warranty when on their site it states if I provide proof of purchase and register the product within 30 days then I have a limited lifetime warranty. I registered the card 4 days after I bought it and on their site when you do that you HAVE to provide proof of purchase to do so.

Limited Lifetime Warranties are available to the original owner on applicable parts if registered by the original owner within 30 days of the date of purchase. A valid proof of purchase is required from an EVGA authorized reseller to verify Limited Lifetime Warranty availability. For more details on the EVGA transferable warranty then please see the Transferable Warranty section below.

Looking on Ebay at cards is scary. There are a LOT of posts that when you click have been removed. Then I saw one where everything looked good where it was listed at $100 start bid or buy for $200 but turns out its a box...ya only the box. but hey, free shipping.

Im looking at one now from the US, 1912 feed back 100%, a GTX 1060 for $100 Canadian . Kinda strange it ships from US but wants Canadian currency. And $80 US for a 1060 new seems bad.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/Graphics-Card- ... Swkh9aebBD

All fucked up it seems. And then ya never know on a cheap used if its been worked to death mining. I trust you guys on here and its why Id rather deal with online friends and such.

Been wondering why this 260 doesn't play anything I want without crashing except GW2 lol....I forget its 10 years old and 8 generations back. Runs a little warm but for a blower fan its quiet. Bout all the good I can say....well it does have a nice graphic on the heatsink cover

You talk a lot about the 'golden age' of gaming, and that you prefer the games from back then. While you're waiting for a solution, you should take this as an excuse to relive all your old favorites. For some of them, the 260 is a blindingly fast card of the future!

Last time I had a similar issue, I got an old, old card with no VRAM and replayed Jagged Alliance 2 and Baldur's Gate.

Well I did install Warhammer Dawn of War which Im always going on about to my friend. I loved that game. Still my favorite DoW game. Or was until I started it up...eech. My memories are better than fact. Im scared to try stuff afraid Ill ruin my memories.

I've been reading up on the shortage/price hikes lately. It doesn't look good, and it sounds like it's going to get worse before it gets better. The consensus I'm seeing all over is that the result is going to be that 1 - MSRP for cards is going to increase as people are willing to pay more. 2 - PC gamers, seeing this, won't upgrade their cards and those whose cards fail are more likely to move on to consoles rather than pay double prices. 3 - this will make crypto miners the primary customers for GPU companies, which will lock in the high prices.

Right now, people are also noticing that you can buy full prebuilt PCs from large companies for barely more than the price of the card inside them (presumably because the manufacturers have a direct line for hardware that bypasses the retail markup.) That means that the home builder is going to be hit hardest by this.

Another thing I've found is that people believe that this is a long-term problem. This likely isn't a thing that you can wait out.

The real pain here is that it has become impractical to buy into PC gaming these days, or to remain in the game as time goes by. That means a shrinking market. And as the market shrinks while game technology advances and PCs can't keep up anymore, PCs will become less and less profitable. Eventually, game developers are going to go with the consoles.

And nobody can see a solution that doesn't involve corporations (AMD/Nvidia) intentionally slashing their profits.

Thats all very very bad.

Yeah, the stuff I was reading earlier this week essentially said:

(1) Buy a console
(2) Buy a pre-built computer
(3) Buy a gaming laptop

None of those made me feel particularly good.

I went with #2. Technically, it was custom from Cyberpower, but still.

I can tell you that CyberPower is quoting me $675 to replace my damaged NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX 1080 8GB GDDR5X. Newegg price is somewhere around $1600 for the same card.

This 260 card im using only had DVI and all I had was a DVI single link cable. I cant run 2560x1080 and read anything. So Monday I ordered a dual link cable from Monoprice. Should have shipped the next day. Their website refuses to show my order. Its just not there. The email auto updates a little graphic showing the package info. So Wednesday it finally shows shipped. But since then its been stuck on 'packed',,,...not actually shipped.

So I called them just now. She has no idea why the webpage shows nothing but claims it shipped Tuesday after all and it will be here by next Wednesday. I used the tracking number they sent me for USPS and it says its only been alerted to a package to ship...nothing shipped yet.

So no idea when or if Ill see this cable. The incompetence and stupidity of the modern American workforce is astounding.

right now i'm looking over the shoulder of the IT guy and he's shopping for even more video cards for cryptocurrency mining

Tell him that the PC gaming community is suffering because he's chasing imaginary money. Maybe leave him a handwritten note indicating he's not helping.

Nowadays, you pretty much have to swear to retail shops you're only buying one to play games to get it near retail. Else it's marked up the wazoo.

So much so, there are talks about NVIDIA and AMD making "headless" GPU cards (i.e. they have no video connections at all)

They already make mining only ones. But miners dont buy them. Why would they. They cant resell them to gamers or anything. This has ruined PC gaming. If it goes on a while then PC will die because no one can get hardware and devs and all will move to consoles.

Let the Bitcoin slide. Fuck these people.

Smoove_B wrote:Yeah, the stuff I was reading earlier this week essentially said:

(1) Buy a console
(2) Buy a pre-built computer
(3) Buy a gaming laptop

None of those made me feel particularly good.

Having just been faced with this dilemma, I went with option 3, and I feel fine about it.

I benchmarked this GTX 260.

Heh, I remember the first time I played Morrowind. I tweaked the hell out of it with the sole intention of maintaining 15 FPS. I believe I was playing it on a Voodoo3 3000 and an Intel Celeron 500mhz. The processor barely touched the minimum requirements, and the Voodoo 3 wasn't even a supported card. I tweaked and squeezed that system for all it was worth, but I still had a blast with it. Same thing with Summoner and Gothic. You can't play shooters with that kind of framerate, but there are some genres that work fine.

Like the checkers genre

RPGs are generally fine. Adventures. Any strategy game that isn't based on twitchy reflexes. Exploration games. Anything turn based.

Daehawk wrote: ↑Sun Feb 11, 2018 7:20 pm I benchmarked this GTX 260.

In preparation for replacing my MSI laptop, I was just getting a feel for the performance improvements I should expect so decided to run all of my benchmarks on it. I have 3DMark scores (for every version available at the time the PC was taken out of service) for every PC I've owned since 1998. Since FutureMark lets you run the professional versions of all the old ones for free, I figured I would take a trip down memory lane and run the old 3DMark2001 SE benchmark. And then lost two hours of my life because I could not get it to use the dedicated GPU (despite telling NVIDIA to only use the dedicated GPU for all apps). So much anger.

Ok here are both tests...the original GTX 260 and the replacement GTX 950. For some reason the 950 is reading 74c temps. It will burn my finger on it quick. Need to see if that is normal. My sound card is right above it almost touching it but that is the PCB side. May need to move the sound card.

260


950

Seeing a listing for a 980 ti on ebay that clearly states does not work...for parts only....then seeing the idiot asking $150 min bid or buy now for $250 makes me want to write them just to call them a sob moron. Parts...theres nothing to use on that! Its not worth $1 for shipping. Morons. Id give them a $1 to see them catch fire and burn to ash. I'd clap for them afterwards perhaps. UGH. World.

The little turd even asks for $17+ for shipping.

Daehawk wrote: ↑Wed Feb 14, 2018 12:43 am Seeing a listing for a 980 ti on ebay that clearly states does not work...for parts only....then seeing the idiot asking $150 min bid or buy now for $250 makes me want to write them just to call them a sob moron. Parts...theres nothing to use on that! Its not worth $1 for shipping. Morons. Id give them a $1 to see them catch fire and burn to ash. I'd clap for them afterwards perhaps. UGH. World.

The little turd even asks for $17+ for shipping.

Well, from recently shipping a video card I can say that the shipping is right where it needs to be. UPS wanted $25 for the cheapest shipping and USPS wanted $20 for cheapest shipping (although this did include purchasing bubble wrap from them as well.)

As for parts, yeah, maybe pulling a fan and that's about it unless you're an electrical engineer or something with equipment to determine what chip is bad on yours and the equipment and know how to change it.

Ya the thing didn't even have the fans or cooler on it.

A friend of mine was just looking to build a gaming pc. Looked at prices and ended up buying a prebuilt because it was significantly cheaper than building without including Windows. Another place to look is Dell's Outlet.

For grins, I tried to download the latest 3DMark, even though my video card is ancient (NVIDIA 445M)

3.8GB just for a video benchmark?!?!?! That's as big as some big shot games. Sheesh

FYI, several popular extensions for Chrome have apparently been bought out and retooled into malware/spyware. Magic Actions is one, Magic Enhancer is another. Others are reporting that Turn Out the Lights is, too. You might want to check.

I don't know if this affects Firefox or not.

Kasey Chang wrote: ↑Thu Feb 15, 2018 6:10 am For grins, I tried to download the latest 3DMark, even though my video card is ancient (NVIDIA 445M)

3.8GB just for a video benchmark?!?!?! That's as big as some big shot games. Sheesh

They usually have a link someplace on their site to old version of their software tools.

Not only did my speakers die a few days ago, I may have also lost my keyboard.

It may be time for me to take a PC gaming hiatus. I haven't been able to keep up with the costs.

I'm doing my best to save the keyboard. It was my own fault - a spill. I've splashed a littl liquid on it from time to time and it never had any effect. This time it was perhaps a tablespoon of mint tea, unsweetened. I wiped it up like I've done in the past and continued playing for an hour or so before it decided that the F10 key was being held down. When I realized what was going on, I unplugged it right away. This morning it was still doing that, plus the LEDs were acting up and it wouldn't stay connected for more than a couple of minutes.

I stripped off all of the keys, wiped everything down with alcohol, and put it in my bedroom with a fan blowing directly on it. I'll leave it there overnight and hopefully it will survive.

I could get a new keyboard (but nothing nearly as good), and I could get new speakers (again, a downgrade), but the problem is becoming more pronounced. Over the past three or four years, my kids have become teenagers, which is expensive. My monthly bills and expenses have increased significantly (~25% rent increase just last month.) At the same time, my monthly income has stayed pretty much the same. In the past I stayed in gaming by saving a set amount ($25) every month, enough to repair or upgrade one piece a year. I haven't been able to afford that in several years. At some point something will break, and there won't be a replacement option. I've resigned that, when that time comes, I'll have to move on from PC gaming. It's a rich man's hobby, and I'm not a rich man.

I feel ya man. People worry about the big things. Its the little things adding up that get you in the end. If I get behind I stay behind. And if a big thing hits me Im done for with it.

Keyboard spill guide: https://www.reddit.com/r/MechanicalKeyb ... ery_guides

Gah, there's a Dell XPS in the outlet with an i5 and a GTX 1070 for only $805!!!!!! Darn IRS... If I have my refund I'd buy it right this second...

Kasey Chang wrote: ↑Sat Jun 02, 2018 12:03 am Keyboard spill guide: https://www.reddit.com/r/MechanicalKeyb ... ery_guides

Thanks! I was already familiar with the process. I learned what to do years ago after losing a brand new Saitek to a drink.

I stripped off all of the keys, wiped everything down with alcohol, and put it in my bedroom with a fan blowing directly on it. I'll leave it there overnight and hopefully it will survive.

It's been plugged in and working now for several hours without issue. I had to reflash the firmware before it would go back to normal, but for now it seems to be OK.