Personal experience:
History:
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I had an old NVidia TNT2 Riva 32MB card about 3 years back. This is useless for most games nowadays. Doom 3 will refuse to even start up saying that you’ve got a lousy card.:). The on board integrated graphics cards are even worse. Tried the Intel Extreme Graphics 2. Quake 2 Evolved wouldnt even run!; even my TNT2 card used to hit 30 fps playing this game
Motive for buying a new card:
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Birthday gifts .new games; Doom 3; Warcraft; Project IGI etc.
Card bought:
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nVidia FX 5200 by Maxforce. Rs 4500/-
Something’s fishy:
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The drivers that came with the card installed perfectly. They had an nVidia startup screen with the logo and all!. It was time to install the latest ForceWare from the nVidia site. Downloaded them. Deinstalled the old drivers. Tried installing the forceware. Forceware said that it didnt detect an nVidia card.
Analysis:
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Being the tinkering sorta guy with no peace.
Tried installing the old drivers and monitored the installation. It was installing cheap XGI video drivers!.
Took a dump of the video bios . XGI core!
Action:
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RETURNED THE CARD immediately but it wasnt accepted till I produced a detailed technical report of my analysis. printed.
RECOMMENDATION:
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Always, just always, NEVER install the drivers that came with your card; they could be fakeware. Download the drivers from the graphic card site and install them.
. as for me, I’ve got my eye on the nVidia 6600GT:). will post a review once I’m done with that.
Have to get a bigger power supply for this card though:(
Till later,
Ryan