LittleWyvern.com

Have you ever wanted to see a picture of 300 dollars cash… set on fire and thrown in the garbage? Well here you go.

The new pieces to my computer arrived yesterday and I fought the excitement all day long at work, rushing home and ripping open the packages like a bespectacled Ralphie searching for his Red Ryder BB Gun. Getting home at 6 o’clock I planned on test driving a working machine by 7. Assembling the pieces took me a bit longer than expected, though only because my perverse obsession with detail required every connection to be checked twice, undone, then checked twice more. Having mounted the processor, heatsink, and then attached the mainboard to my case I felt really proud of myself. Proud of the beautifully monstrous frankenstein being assembled before me. Like a modern day Greek tragedy, my hubris was destined to destroy me in the end.

The first sign of trouble came when I attempted to connect the motherboard to my power supply. The two plugs just wouldnt seem to go together. After a period of delicate, but appropriately forceful, ramming together of the plugs I decided to count the number of connections on each piece. Power supply…. 20. Motherboard…. 24. I felt a quick jolt of panic before rushing to the internet and researching the origins of these four bonus plugs. After twenty minutes or so I came across some other idiot who ran into the same problem and offered the seemingly reasonable solution, “yeah, just ignore those four extra plugs, only use the first twenty.” Normally this would sound suspicious, but there it was before me, truth. I recognized it as truth because it was on the internet. I jammed the twenty plugs together, ignoring the extra four, and moved on.

Everything else was cool until I went to connect my video card (you may remember it from the picture at the top of this post). I went to slide it into the motherboard when I came across an upsetting and wholly unexpected problem. The card wouldn’t fit into the slot. I guess “upsetting” doesnt really convey the appropriate emotion for this situation. “Totally fucking devastating” is a bit closer. As it happens the new motherboard I ordered uses PCI-Express as its video card interface, as opposed to AGP like every other board I have ever used. When I was ordering the new board I was specifically told to get a PCI-Express board because they are the proverbial “wave of the future”. I didn’t even stop to consider what the PCI-Express slots would be used for, foolishly assuming that it would be in addition to the AGP slots I have come to expect. But no, my video card has an AGP interface, my board has a PCI-Express interface, and their resulting sum is bullshit. So now I have a choice.

1) Throw away 450 dollars of brand new, near top of the line hardware and go back to what I was using before.
2) Spend 300 dollars buying a brand new video card that is roughly equivalent, and perhaps slightly better, than the card I have now. But also get to keep and use the new hardware that I got today.

Spending another few hundred dollars didn’t make me happy, but I figure that for 300 dollars I am actually buying 800 dollars worth of hardware because without a new video card, everything I just bought is totally useless. Phrased in that way, it seemed like a pretty good deal. (The upshot to being a moron is that I am able to talk myself into almost anything)

After a two hour crusade across north chicago, visiting multiple Best Buys and even, yes I know, a Circuit City, I was still empty handed. The problem with buying a new video card for a new motherboard is that I require a very specific card. I wanted the x800 XL PCI-E card, not the x700 XL and sure as shit not the x800 XL AGP card. Yet with every stop the card would be conspicuously absent from the shelves, and with every inquiry I would be subjected to a half-assed sales pitch about how maybe I saw something else I might like and how all the cards are pretty much the same anyway. Yeah, thanks Best Buy employee. You may have been promoted to chief of the computer department, but you’re still a moron.

Even better than forcing a smile while hearing a lecture on the virtues of AGP was the wonderment I experienced within the aisles of Circuit City. Entering the enormous Circuit City complex I quickly found my way to the computer section, and soon after to the row of video cards. The video cards were locked behind glass in a long cabinet extending the length of the department. A good sign. After 5 minutes of examination my frown was flipped straight upside down when the particular card was not found. I did a double check, this time reading the price tags instead of the boxes, hoping that maybe I just missed it the first time over. The card I was looking for retails for around 300 dollars. I was shocked to find that the absolute highest price for any card in the entire glass case was $150. Realize, new video cards at the top of the line sell for $500-$1000 each. A good card will run you $250-$400. Even my one-year-old 9800 pro sells for $200. And the absolute best card Circuit City offered was $150. Fine, so they obviously didn’t sell my card. I am apparently not their target consumer. But then I started thinking, just who exactly IS their target consumer? What kind of person buys a video card seperate from their computer, but is looking for a bargain-brand, 2-generations-ago card? The cards are targeted for the “Dude, you’re getting a Dell!” crowd, but I can’t imagine a single one of them would ever actually consider upgrading their video card. At least not from one POS to another, marginally better POS. It’s like we were told in our ResNet training at Northwestern. We supported Windows, Mac, and Linux but only learned to troubleshoot the first two. Why? Because if someone is running Linux on their personal machines, they probably already know what they’re doing.

So in the end I ordered my new video card, and while I was at it I scored a new power supply, complete with all 24 plugs.