And then it rained.
Sometimes, I’m struck by the fail in my life. Some of it is correctable, and innocent, and some of it is not.
I shipped a friend of mine a video card - next day - to replace his failed card. It arrived exactly as prescribed, only they didn’t leave it at his place, instead (as makes sense) opting to retry delivery later… The story goes on from there, but it was a mess.
Separately, I ordered a new graphics card from Amazon, which I expected to find delivered at my home when I arrived there. Sadly, Amazon failed to provide Fedex with the package on time, so my shipment was delayed. I ended up telling them to go pound sand and driving to my friendly neighborhood computer store, which is less friendly and less neighborhood than I might like. I did eventually get my graphics card.
So now I begin the empirical evaluation of my Radeon HD 5850 - it being the replacement for my 9800GTX. I’ve been an nVidia guy for a long time, and probably will be after this exercise is over… but we’ll see. My last ATI card was from 2004, and I was not impressed. Since then, AMD has bought them out, and one would hope they’ve learned something.
So far, I have one gripe. Bloat. Their drivers left me with 3 entries in my windows 7 start menu - the first thing I saw was an ATI Icon, which.. was followed by two more, in addition to the expected start menu drivel.
Really, I just paid you $300 for this damned thing. I don’t need you trying to sell me on LOTR online or your marketing spam.
C’mon. Keep this up and I’ll actually look forward to replacing this card with some kind of nVidia GF104 derivative.