Old days are back again !

You know what, I got my brand new graphics card ( GPU a.k.a. Graphic Processing Unit)

Bought it from US at 79$ i.e. around 3,500 Rs. In India, its about 13,000 Rs. Isn't it amazing??? Nice deal I must say. A friend of mine, Ravi, went to US on official trip. He's the one who bought this one for me. I was bit scary regarding its compatibility with Vista, but all worked fine.

Installation was pretty simple, open your CPU side cover, fix up card in PCI- E slot, blah blah blah, nothing complex in it.

I don't know why manufactures assume that the people buying their products are blessed with a good Internet connection. It's same with every company, be it my beloved Microsoft or XFX. Why can't they [XFX or NVIDIA] supply Vista compatible drivers with the driver CD that came with the package. I have to download that 10 Mb set up package for installing Nvidia GPU drivers on windows Vista. I just don't like this type of marketing. Manufacturers should do everything possible so that their product is completely packaged together. It's like going to a shop for buying pants. You buy a nice trousers, you reach home, you open the package, waiting to try out, but package content reveals that Zip was not available when this pant was manufactured, and you should go and get your zip from so and so location. If they print on their package that product is 100% vista compatible, they should also mention that you will need to download this set up from their support web site. Funny and painful.

Keeping aside all these woes, let me tell you some of the specs:

Stream Processors:16
Shader Clock:900 MHz
Chipset:GeForce™ 8500 GT
Memory Clock :667 MHz
Dual Link DVI - Supporting digital output up to 2560x1600
Memory:256 MB
Bus Type:PCI-E
Memory Type:DDR2
Othe Features
Vista Ready, DVI Out , HDCP Ready , SLI ready , RoHS , HDTV ready

I have installed Need For Speed-Carbon and Quake 4. Amazing graphics and details. I haven't seen anything like this on computer before.

Quake Sceenshots:

If it's in the game, then it's in the game [EA Sports tag line]
~bLaCkHaWk~