The video card I purchased for my new monster is the VisionTek XTASY RADEON X850XT. I had never really heard of VisionTek before I bought this card but they had it at Fry’s for about 100 dollars cheaper than other X850XT cards by different companies. So I grabbed it. A review I read online said they were able to use this card to play Half-Life 2 at 1600×1200, all the eye candy turned all the way up, and still average over 100 frames per second. Sounds good to me. It took me a while to get my computer setup this weekend so I didn’t even get games installed until Sunday night. But when I did… wow. This was a sweet card. I don’t think I was getting 100 FPS but with everything turned all the way up, I was hovering around 60 FPS in Counter Strike: Source. Very cool. I also spent some time playing Half-Life 2. I’m not sure what my FPS were in that but I never saw any video lag. Wow, listen to me. I can’t seem to find a single thing wrong with this card. Well enough of my gushing for VisionTek. Let’s get to the screen shots. Click the image to see it full size.

That’s right. This is pure shit. After only 2 days of playing games, this card locks up and crashes. The pictures above were some of the better times when I could actually navigate my computer. Now the fan on the card spins erratically and it always looks like crap. I have uninstalled the drivers, reinstalled the drivers, booted into safe mode (when the drivers aren’t used, only default Windows VGA drivers) and it still looks like this. So it went back into its box to go live at Fry’s again. I told them to send it back to the vendor and not put it back on the shelf with sticker and a 5 dollar discount. I’m going to a different store tomorrow to pick up the ASUS version of the same card. It’s about 100 dollars more but at least I’ve heard of ASUS.
I’m really hoping it’s just a problem with the card manufacturer (and not the ATI chip), otherwise it will be back to nVidia for me, this time for good.

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The little skull fan cover was supposed to be an alien face. Makes sense since it would go with the theme. But I guess the company that made my case thought skulls were cooler. “My computer is so cool it’s dead!”

I also added a lot of other pictures here.
I thought of making a big huge post with pictures and stuff but decided to just add the gallery and then comment on the individual pictures so check it out.
Also, some of the pictures might look weird because I didn’t use a flash. I was trying to capture the look with the glow since the flash always drowns that out.

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I’m sure a lot of you have seen this before but I ran across a good copy of this on the net the other day. By good I mean large, as most of the other ones I saw were really small resolution images. Anyway, this is probably my favorite owned/pwned picture ever.

Here’s another one I really liked for the video game reference.

These and a lot of other funny ones can be found here at UrbanDictionary.

And for those who don’t know, here is UrbanDictionary’s definition for owned and its derivative, pwned.

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Another plastic massacre.

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