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[GenTsoChiken]

ok, so. on Wednesday, i bought an Nvidia GTX 260 for $160 and it arrived today. I'm quite happy, mind you. i take it out of the box, put my desktop on my workbench and find out that the card, physically, wont fit in my case. its too long. im like, SON OF A BITCH!! i also discover, my PSU wont handle the card. its a 480 and the card needs a 500 with a 36 amp 12v rail. my PSU only has one 12v rail at 18 amps. no dice.

im thinking that all i would need is a new PSU so i take a closer look and i think to myself, hey, maybe if i rearrange the hard drives and cards, it will fit on the secondary PCI-E slot. i work it around and it goes in. then i start thinking, i better check the mobo manual to see if it will work. turns out it wont work to its full potential. it will drop from x16 to x2 on that slot. if it was on SLI, it would be x8, but i dont have two, i have one.....

i get the card into the main slot and found out the card blocks the southbridge fan and ALL the SATA ports on the mobo. the 2 hard drives in my comp are SATAs. this situation is getting worse and worse by the minute.

i give deto a call to get his opinion on the matter and his short answer was that im screwed no matter what i do. we talk and decide that no matter what, i need a new PSU, so he helps me pick one out. then he tells me that hes got a CPU that he hasn't opened and is willing to sell me for dirt cheap. all appears to be getting better, so it seems. now i need a new mobo to go with the CPU and RAM to go with the mobo. we pick those out too, and guess what. ive started with a vid card and wound up with a new computer. ETA, end of the month. Estimated price, $500-600 all together.

and all i wanted to do was make things look better on my monitor.....

[PsiFire]

See what happens when you yield to vanity?

[GenTsoChiken]

but its a bad assed monitor! http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16824236033

[Popsikle]

thats why i have not upgraded my gfx card yet on my home machine.  Once I do I need new mobo,new ram, new chip, and then should just get a new case and bigger hard drives.

Im going to end up with two computers again.

[GenTsoChiken]

well, i ordered the last piece on sat, should arrive tomorrow. prolly get it together and built by thurs. debug friday and post specs and benchmarks on sat, if i get time to do all that :-P

[Cullam3n]

Wait what system specs?  What motherboard only runs x2 on an x16 slot?  Something doesn't make sense.

[GenTsoChiken]

the old board was a DFI lan party nF4 SLI-D. the primary slot runs at x16 but the secondary runs at x2 when in the single card config. once in the SLI config, its x8 on both ports.

well, the new computer is done now.

EVGA 896-P3-1260-TR GeForce GTX 260
Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6850 3GHz
GIGABYTE GA-EP45-UD3R
Patriot Extreme Performance 4GB PDC24G8500ELKR2
OCZ GameXStream OCZ600GXSSLI 600W

then i reused my HDs and DVD drive.

[Cullam3n]

Looks good but unless you got a good deal on the QX6850 I would have gone with a 45nm quad like a q9xxx.  Nice to get back to smooth gaming though you will find

[GenTsoChiken]

oh yea, i got a good deal on that :p how's $100 sound?

[$hellCoder]

Good deal!  Nice specs.  What case did you put it in ?   What ever happened to the briefcase?

[GenTsoChiken]

oh, i still have the briefcase, its just sitting around. i put it in my old, OLD case. it all fits there, i have enough cases sitting around my house, i dont think i would want another one.