Date: 09/09/06 (Computer Geeks)    Keywords: ebay

Thanks for the advice that some of you gave me on my graphics card upgrade. I'm actually doing this out of amusement (people do worse things out of boredom than this- like bungee jumping a VW from a bridge), a "haha look at what I'm doing to my old computer" sort of thing. I installed ATI HDTV Wonder to the 1.8GHz P4, with some "interesting" results. It did one of those putt-putt jobs where the HDTV picture slows down and speeds up. After I slapped in more RAM to 1GB, the putt-putting got much better. It might even go away completely after I put in the Geforce 6800 that I just got from Fleabay eBay. It was going on a GeForce4 Ti4200 so constipation was a problem.

(I'm not rich. I didn't spend that much on the used 6800.)

Assuming that the card would arrive by UPS unmolested and in such great working condition (one should never assume these things, but I'm just making conversation) that it actually allows for pipe unlock, the 3DMark 03/05 shootout to determine which machine is slower than the other is going to look like this:

Machine 1: "Supercharged Lawnmower with NOS"

HP Vectra VL420
P4 Willamette 1.8GHz
1GB RAM
eVGA Nvidia GeForce 6800 AGP 128mb, unlocked to 16 pipes / 6 vertex procs
vanilla PATA 7400RPM Hard Disk

Machine 2: "Ford Tempo"

Dell Inspiron 9100
P4 Prescott 3.0GHz HT
512MB RAM
God-knows-what-brand ATI Mobility Radeon 9700 PCIe (roughly equates to desktop 9600 at most)
wimpy notebook 5200RPM Hard Disk


It would be hilarious if the lawnmower loses... The drag race to the slowest and ends up being faster, that is. I don't think so, however.

Source: http://community.livejournal.com/computergeeks/976493.html