Technological Woes...

After getting pissed off with my stuttering and failing Geforce 7900GT that finally gave up the ghost after two years of overheating, I surfed overclockers for a new card.

Now Nvidia seem to have this bizarre numbering thing going on when it comes to their cards - I'd always assumed that the higher the number, the better the card. So with that in mind,

8500GT with 512mb Ram > 7900GT with 256mb Ram.
Right?
Wrong.

Unfortunately, the only reason I know it's wrong is because I fitted the 8500GT and went back to playing my favourite games. Or tried to go back to playing them, because to be frank, the 8500GT is so slow, it's not even worth buying it for running 3d studio max on - that's right, a 3d modelling program requires more performance than this thing can give.
So who does buy a 3d graphics card with 512mb of ram, geforce no less, and doesn't want to play games on it? Quite a few people apparently because there are even worse cards like the 8400 for sale, which seems to be just powerful enough for word processing.

Admittedly, there's nothing wrong with the card, it does the job it says it does on the box - which is not the same as the job it says it does at overclockers: "smooth gaming with the future DirectX 10 games". You have got to be absolutely kidding me. This thing won't even run Star Trek Legacy without fitting and starting like an epileptic at a disco (find that comment offensive? Good, if you're the sort of person who finds stuff like that offensive then you deserve to be offended), and that's about as graphically intensive as Unreal Tournament 3's USER MENU!
"Unbeatable Performance" How the hell do they put that on the box with a straight face, knowing that the card is not as good as one that went out of date over three years ago??.

I'll tell you - on further inspection, the only place on this box that says "8500GT" is the sticker that's been slapped on the front. Looking online, it looks like they use the same boxes for all their cards, and the only thing that changes is the stickers, so essentially, not only have overclockers regurgitated the same crap they use to sell all their cards - good AND bad - but this box is just repeating the lies. "Double Your Performance With SLI" SLI MY CARD?! Jesus Mary and Joseph on a pogo stick, who the hell would buy two of these wastes-of-a-pci-slot to SLI them together and still get less power out of the pair than out of a 3 year old £25 Geforce 7900GT?! Am I missing something here?! That's like fitting two 1.1 litre engines in a car, when you could get a 6 litre v8 for a quarter of the price!! Geez, are people that stupid? Er, I cut it close by buying this damn thing, but I would never buy TWO of them, good god!

I'm going to have a quick look round, seeing if there are any settings i need to enable to get the card to do the job I bought it for but I think it's gonna be an ebay jobbie. It had been in my computer for less than an hour and a half before I decided that it needs to be replaced. So if you're looking round for a graphics card to grace your computer, a card that looks good but doesn't actually require you to buy any games to take care of any of its processing power, the 8500 is the one for you, and I have one for sale right here, at cost, £46.99, many thanks.

Oh, Its not all bad luck with technology by the way, I took my clothes out of the drier one morning this week to get ready for work, inside the pocket of one i found a little cf card pouch with "sandisk" on the side.
"oops" I thought, opening it to find my 4gb 60x lexar card in there. That thing had been through a 75 minute 40 degree C wash cycle, and then through a 2 hour cycle in the drier at about 50C.
I stuck it in my camera out of sheer optimism, and snapped a few photos. Did it work? Ha.
Well, yes it did actually, it worked fine. So I'll put that one down to luck :).

Have fun, I'll be in touch.