Incoming Gadget – A New Video Card!

This should be fairly self-explanatory but the time has come to replace the aging GTX 295 video cards in my desktop computer. Gaming at 2560 x 1600 resolution on those older cards is becoming more difficult given the relatively small amount of video RAM.

Given that my birthday is roughly a week before Christmas I thought I’d eliminate the guesswork for my wife and suggest that I get myself an EVGA Geforce GTX 780 Ti Superclocked ACX video card. After some thought, I thought this card was better for the majority of the games I would be playing and would be more power efficient compared to the AMD R9 290X. That said, the AMD cards are excellent for Bitcoin mining compared to the nVidia cards but I think the boat may have well and truly sailed there but I might see how I go with alternative crypto-currencies such as Litecoin to see if I can mint anything there before its popularity takes off.

I also decided to go with the top of the range superclocked version of the GTX 780 Ti from EVGA. Given that the price of the standard GTX 780 Ti is only $20 cheaper than the superclocked version and $30 cheaper than the superclocked version with ACX cooling it was a no-brainer. For those that don’t know, the ACX cooler provides superior cooling performance over the reference cooler designed by nVidia. Although it might not look quite as cool as the reference cooler I don’t mind so much given that I don’t stare at the side my desktop tower all day.

Anyway, stay tuned for an unboxing video and I’ll also take the opportunity to make a video on how to upgrade video cards for those of you who aren’t sure about how to do it.