Went a little nutty last night and bought myself a new video card. I partially justified it because I can write it off come tax time, but really it was 100% about treating myself. It's not that there was anything wrong with my existing card, exactly, but in trying to branch out to games beyond WoW I've discovered that many of the ones that I wanted to try (such as Call of Duty and Mass Effect) run like a slideshow at anything higher than 800x600. And on a 24" monitor, that looks like a terribly pixelated mess. Obviously the games are still playable, but so many modern games are cinematic masterpieces that I felt like I was missing out (and it was making it REALLY hard to pick out Japanese snipers in Call of Duty.)

The bare-bones settings I had to use on these games actually surprised me quite a bit since I'm just to running WoW at 1920x1200...but I guess that WoW really doesn't stress video cards that much. (It definitely punishes people with less than 2 gigs of RAM though.)

I guess if people can justify spending 1k+ on a big plasma TV, it's not a stretch to spend far less than that on a video card...but I'm cheap and this is pretty out of line for me. Still, it's the next day and I don't have any buyer's remorse so I guess that's a good sign (and unusual for me).

I think the fact that I stayed up until 2:30 am playing Mass Effect with all graphic settings maxed and at my monitor's full 1920x1200 helped alleviate any unhappiness I might have had. Just...wow. I'm gonna load up Call of Duty today and see if I can also max out the settings there.

The card I got is the GeForce 9800 GTX+ (PCI Express x16). First of all, let me say that this card is monstrously big. It twice as long as previous video card and about three times as thick. It's actually so thick that it covers up two slots on my computer -- I've lost access to my PCIe x1 slot completely (which isn't being used). It also has a big horking fan on it, which has added a noticeable amount of noise to my machine, though only because it was previously whisper-quiet (good job on the Dimension 9200, Dell!) It's certainly quieter than virtually every PC I've ever owned, even with the new video card. And I guess the cooling is pretty important, since the model I bought is one of those pre-overlocked jobs they market to gamers, so it should be faster than a "stock" 9800 GTX+.

The sad part about all this is that it's now much more likely that I'll find the WoW experience on my 5-year-old Mac unbearable in comparison and that it will grow increasingly unused. *sigh*