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Hey guys. This thread serves no significant purpose other than a mildly interesting story about graphics cards.

So in December 2011 when nVidia was phasing out the GTX 4xx series, I managed to find a GTX 460 768mb for 50% off at Best Buy, which brought it down to about $112 if I recall correctly. So since I was getting together my new build, I decided to drop the cash and pick it up. I popped it in, replacing my 9800 GT 1GB that had served me loyally for a while. So the GTX 460 was obviously a big upgrade, but not for long. The fact it was 768mb wasn't too good. It bottlenecked my performance with a lot of games, since it couldn't pull off the high settings at my native resolution of 1600x900 very well. So now, over a year and a half later, the limitation started getting to me.

I started shopping around and was between a GTX 660 and HD 7870. Then I stumbled upon the EVGA GTX 760 2GB superclocked with ACX cooling. It was $260 as compared to $170 for the 660 and $180 for the 7870. I decided to bite the bullet and get the 760 because I figured being 22% faster than the 660, it will last me well into the next console cycle. It came today (after being a day late than my 1-day guarantee from UPS; Amazon prime is amazing though, $4 for 1-day shipping and free 2-day shipping). I installed it at about 1:00pm and booted up the PC. I went to install the drivers and they failed probably about 10 times in a row.

Two and a half hours later, I found a solution on Google. I had to run Ccleaner to delete my damaged directories, disable my antivirus, restart the computer in safe mode, then uninstall my display drivers in the control panel, then manually find the drivers through the control panel. The drivers were finally installed. Huzzah!

This has been by far the most painful experience I've had upgrading or building a PC before. But hey, I can nearly max Tomb Raider (lower settings on AA and anisotrophic filtering, and no TressFX) and the 760 absolutely destroys Dishonored at max.

Also, nVidia is doing a promotion right now where you get Splinter Cell Blacklist digital deluxe edition (normally $70) for free if you buy a Geforce card.

So in closing, a completely useless story, but maybe an interesting read. I do recommend the GTX 460 if you can pick it up, but definitely the 1GB if you have a resolution higher than 800x600 (which I pray you do). And I 100% recommend the GTX 760 at $250 for most editions or $260 for the one I got.

I picked up 2 480's a few weeks back for the grand total of £0 / $0 and gave one to a friend of mine for free when he bought a rig off me for a fair price...

The GTX series cannot come more recommended than anything else...

About the multiple failures, are you running XP by any chance?

Nope, W7 64 bit. It was probably just the left over damaged registries that weren't fully uninstalled when I went to kill the drivers. Good thing Ccleaner exists.

And about those two 480s. I notice that price tag. I'm rather jealous.

Not to mention the 1.5GB RAM on them ^^ and 480 CUDA cores ^^ old card but beefy and still packs quite a punch when compared to todays cards, the 177~GB/s memory bandwidth is simply lovely!

http://www.geforce.co.uk/hardware/desktop-gpus/geforce-gtx-480/specifications

Did you not use the clean install method?

Nope, I did every time. It must have just... missed them. I dunno.

Hmm... In over 15 years I have never had to use any form of cleaners on my systems... And hardly ever had driver issues...

well at least it is working now

have you ran 3D Mark or similar yet?

Nope, not yet! The driver disk has Heaven right on it, so I might as well try that out.