Vdsat.com

This is what a downward spiral looks like.

I feel like getting a new video card because the noisiest component in my computer is my video card. Okay, so it’s time to plop down $150 to $250 for a video card, right? Considering that my computer is almost 4 years old, it does not make sense for me to just buy a new video card.
I might as well get a new CPU…
Which means I have to get a new motherboard…
And of course buy a whole mess of ram and fill up all the slots…
And since if I do all that, the bottleneck in my computer would be my hard drive so why don’t I get a 10k RPM drive…
But no, I should get two and setup a RAID 1 configuration…
And on top of all that, I need to get a nice cool and quiet case because there’s no point in buying all of the above without a good case.

Add all this up, and the total comes out to about $1,000.

Okay, so maybe I don’t need to go all out. Perhaps I can go with something far cheaper and only spend $100 on the video card. Heck, if I am going to go cheap, I might as well go with integrated graphics. I start from scratch and make another configuration that comes out to about $400. However, if I compare this to what I have currently, sure it is better, but it is not worth the upgrade. That $400 spent would be a total waste of money. If I go buy the $1,000 computer, the amount of waste would only be the $600 on top of the $400 for the baseline computer. If I am willing to waste $400 on a piece of junk, instead of wasting that $400, I might as well go blow $1,000.

The problem with blowing $1,000 is that the rate of depreciation is ridiculous. In terms of stock options, buying that $1,000 computer gives you a very nasty theta decay. Sure, I could do it and afford it without a problem at all because I save a large chunk of my paycheck each month, but why would I want to do that to myself? That is precisely the problem. I save a large chuck of my paycheck each month so it feels very unnatural for me to go blow this money. Money becomes more valuable in a downturn, and if I can hold off on buying a new computer for just another year, the payoff will be huge. It’s just not worth it to buy a computer now. Instead of buying a new computer because I am getting a new video card, why not just buy a super lame piece of crap video card, and use my 4 year old computer for another year? My computer is a piece of junk anyway, Tribes 2 is the only game I play, and the only real complaint about my computer is that the video card is too loud. I never thought I’d do this, but I just bought a $40 video card; it’s an ATI Radeon HD 4350 without a fan.

Image courtesy of Newegg

In 1999 I paid $200 for an Nvidia TNT 2 Ultra.

In 2001 I paid $360 for a GeForce 3.

In 2003 I paid $190 for an ATI Radeon 9700 non-pro.

In 2005 I paid $97 for an ATI Radeon X700.

In 2007 I paid $84 for an ATI Radeon X1600 Pro because my X700 died (heat-sink issues).

And now, in 2009, I just paid $40 for an ATI Radeon HD 4350.

I just made a spreadsheet of all the video cards I have owned and it seems like I am going downhill, that is, the new video card I get is progressively suckier.

Sure, the memory is increasing as well as the core clock, but I’ve been going downhill on memory bandwidth since my ATI Radeon 9700 in 2003. There are video cards out there right now with 8x more fillrate and 14x more memory bandwidth than the ATI Radeon HD 4350 I am getting. As long as my card can run Tribes 2, I am happy. You may wonder why I can’t go back to my Radeon 9700. The answer is that the bus interface is now different and it’s been that way for a long time.

The only reason for me to justify a purchase of a new computer is if I somehow decide to play anything other than Tribes 2. Right now I see 20 people on that one remaining server. Tribes 2 is still alive so I don’t have to move on to something else yet.

UPDATE: I cancelled my order. I think I may have to carefully reconsider. I remember the ATI Radeon 9700 was such an awesome card. Even though the fillrate of the Radeon 9700 is only 1.375x larger than that of the GeForce 3, it’s memory bandwidth advantage was massive and this card was the first card I owned that could run Tribes 2 with all the settings maxed out an stay above 80 frames per second. Right now on my Radeon X1600 PRO I am only getting about 60 frames per second. If I get a Radeon HD 4350, my memory bandwidth is going to get completely destroyed and I don’t think I’ll be able to break 40 frames per second in Tribes 2. I am leaning towards blowing $1,000 now.

UPDATE 2: I am going to go ahead and buy the $40 video card. It looks like I was v-sync limited. When I took v-sync off, I average around 90-110 frames per second but it looks horrible without vsync. My LCD refreshes at 60 Hz anyway so I feel comfortable buying a lame $40 card.

Trackback URI | Comments RSS