Nearly 2 years ago I bought a new gaming work rig.

It's hands-down been one of the best investments I've ever made. Since purchasing it, I've upgraded it into a new case (one that looks nicer, and has better airflow with a slightly smaller footprint/chassis), upgraded it to 8GB of RAM, and slapped in an SSD RAID-0. It's still so snappy and responsive that it's hard to even quantify. Eventually I'll probably put a Core 2 Quad into it, and maybe swap out my slower RAM for some faster RAM, but otherwise, the system is great.

GeForce 8800 GTS
There has been one let down though – my 8800 GTS video cards. Despite how INSANELY awesome they were from a performance standpoint – and despite how insanely awesome it was to have TWO of them, they just didn't seem to like being a part of my awesome system.

As you can see from the picture of pure awesomeness above, I had 2 EVGA GeForce 8800 GTS cards (okay, so the photo only shows one card) with 320MB of RAM each. Paired up, that was 192 stream processors, a whole bunch of GHz and MHz of Memory and Processor speeds, and 640MB of Video Memory.

Only, about a year ago, one of them just up and died on me. (Sadly, after the warranty had expired.) So I ponied up for another one… and things have been just fine. Until last Friday, when the OTHER one died. So, in less than two years, the failure rate on both of these pigs was 100%. Which, despite their insane awesomeness, just wasn't well… awesome (or, frankly, even acceptable).

The New/Lesser Coolness
So, rather than taking another gamble on a now discontinued card, I decided to downgrade a bit. Truth is, I never really ran in SLI other than a few times to see what it was like – because as cool as SLI is, you only get one monitor. So, as much as I liked having an SLI compatible machine, all I really need 2 video cards for is to be able to run more than 2 monitors. (I'm up to three now and would TOTALLY grab a fourth except three kick off a lot of heat and I'm worried about what 4 would do.)

So, I snagged an EVGA GeForce 8600 GTS. It 'only' has 32 stream processors, and only has 256MB of RAM, but actually has faster bus speeds than my 8800 GTS (as it came out later). So, while it's not a gaming replacement for my remaining GTS 8800, it does JUST fine running a third monitor (and will support my need for a fourth if I ever decide to just take a risk on the heat issues). And since it uses the exact same driver as my 8800GTS, I can run Aero Glass JUST FINE on it and so on.

Best of all, it was only $55 instead of $180… and comes with a 2 year warranty instead of a 1 year warranty. And, for the record, I swear I read something about NVidia having problems with HIGH FAILURE rates on some of their cards – and I blame them, NOT EVGA because EVGA literally has the best customer service and support of any hardware vendor that I know of…