blargh
So I came home on Friday to the lovely sound of silence. The power company was working on my street and shut off the power to the neighborhood. Unfortunately, when the power came back my PC did not. After several hours of troubleshooting, it seems that my video card is defunct. From what I can gather, there was a defect in the manufacturing for that generation of Nvidia cards that caused their heatsinks to develop microfractures after long periods of use at high temperatures. Since it was a high end card, it was always hot. When the card cooled to room temperature, the cracks widened and now it overheats as soon as the OS loads.
Since I had planned to spend this weekend vegging out on Mass Effect in preparation for the arrival of ME2 later this month, I popped over to Best Buy to find a new card. Apparently, Best Buy no longer stocks high-end video cards in their stores. I guess that makes sense, since their selection of PC games has long since dwindled to copies of Hoyle 73, Fast Food Tycoon, and The Sims 57. Frustrated, I headed next door to Fry’s Electronics, who didn’t have what I wanted either, but did have high-end cards from the current generation. I grabbed one in the hopes of getting my uber-rig back online this weekend.
It was not to be. The machine would not even POST with the new card installed. My damaged card could do better than that! That’s what I get for buying from Fry’s. I brought the ‘new’ card back to the store where the girl at the returns desk helpfully verified that the device they sold me was, in fact, as functional as Ted Kennedy.
Defeated, I went home and ordered the card that I wanted. A better card than the one from Fry’s at a much lower price – even after expedited shipping – than I paid to those assholes.
There is a silver lining to this ordeal, however. About year ago I had to RMA my motherboard after my new mobo got toasted barely a month after I installed it. It was a huge pain to get all four of my DIMMs installed in the original motherboard; there was much tweaking of voltages and timings involved in getting it to run 8 gigs of low latency DDR3. I never bothered to do that again with the new board. Today, since my computer’s case was open and I had nothing better to do, I got the two extra DIMMs I’ve had on my desk for a year reinstalled in my PC. So, although I have a barely functioning video card that I can’t use to do anything fun, at least I have 8GB of RAM, again.