Finally got my VGA :)

I’ve been away from my blog for far too long now. I’ve been waiting for my VGA for 4 weeks or so. (After I ordered it.) And finally I got it. I should have written this a week ago, but as any game addict, I installed some of the resent games and started playing them. All I can say about it.. “OMG”

First things first. I bought an Asus EN8800GT (512MB) VGA card. This is PCI-E 2 and DDR 3 supported card, which has the G92 GPU core.

G92 Architecture highlights

• Full Direct3D 10 Support
• DirectX10 Shader Model 4.0 Support
• Vertex Shader 4.0
• Geometry Shader 4.0
• Pixel Shader 4.0
• Internal 128-bit Floating Point (FP32) Precision
• Unlimited Shader Lengths
• Up to 128 textures per pass
• Support for FP32 texture formats with filtering
• Non-Power of two texture support
• 8 multiple Render Targets

The package includes, full copy of Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts on DVD, driver and manual CD, a paper Quick Start guide, a single DVI to VGA adapter, TV out cable and Molex to six-pin PCI Express power adapter.

I was so exited when I first got the VGA out from its packing and wanted to see what the performance of this little giant was. So I took the VGA and plugged it in. The first thing I noticed about this is the power supplying method used in this. This card requires 12V of power which was given by plugging in two 6V power sockets through a simple connector. And currently my machine consists of a Quad core processor with two 2GB memory cards, one DVD writer and a DVD ROM, plus the usual cooling fans. So I got every thin fixed up and turned my machine on logged in and installed the drivers and the utility software which was given with the card. After all this I restarted my machine and guess what happened…

It kept restarting right before loading windows. The machine got booted up but couldn’t go in to windows at all. This was both confusing and irritating at the same time. So I called my dealer and asked what the reason was for it. And as I feared it was due to the lack of power for the VGA. I was worried about this because I couldn’t find any decent power supplies in Sri Lanka. Usually our PC dealers use the 400W PSU (the one I had) because its enough to power up any type of basic PC. And when the customer asked for a 500W, and if they didn’t have it, what they would do is stick a 500W label on a 400W PSU and sell it off as 500W “original” PSU. And to top it all the Asus dealers in LK had a PSU of 520W which had a price tag around 17,000 Rs. I had a feeling I would have to import a PSU from Singapore to get this working. And that would have cost another 3 or 4 weeks.

I was so looking forward to get this thing up and running. All I can say is shit happens man. But never wanting to give up, I gave it a one last chance. Removed the side panel with its fan, DVD ROM and the writer and switched it on. And then… it worked. IT WAS ALIVE… My own little Frankenstein. This thing had its side panel removed with no ROMs plugged in, freak by any means.

Finally I got it working. And the first thing I did was install CoD4 to it. But I’ll leave that story to the next post.