I’ve officially declared my Asus 9600XT dead. No matter how much I fiddle with it or underclock it or cry and beg it consistenly throws artifacts when trying to do anything 3d. And once they start the corruption carries over to the desktop.

(Update: Not just little lines sort of artifacts.. but this)

I’ve tried a LOT to get this solved. New power supply, fan and heat sinks. Endless time twiddling bios settings. In the end I think it’s just toasted.

Currently I’m running a backup Nvidia GeForce 2 mx 32mb card. Almost totally worthless for WoW use. It’s also sad to have to run my 2005FPW with the analog connection rather than the DVI.

I returned the 500w power supply I got over the weekend and intended to swap it for an MSI 9600XT that was on sale for 85 bucks. But the sale had ended the day before. ACK!

I’ve got my eyes on this XFX 6600GT. The price for the chipset is more than 50 bucks cheaper at new egg than I can find anywhere else and the super reviews just keep rolling in on it. The XFX flavor apparently is the only AGP version of the card to actually run it’s memory at 1Ghz as well… all other coming in at 900mhz - PCI-Express runs a 1Ghz. The card is also supposedly very overclock friendly - though I’ve never really felt the need to do that with any hardware in the past.

So yeah.. I’d get that if I could.

I have this nice little fan with LEDs on that I want to find a use for now. Maybe I can find a way to rig it onto my north bridge.

With all the hardware I go through and have laying around perhaps I should take up the hobby of making pieces of art out of everything. Nah.. that’d be a dead on indication that I’m getting old. I noticed the other day that I’m wearing sneakers and colared shirts now rather than my boots and leather jacket. (Not to mention having two kids)