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This christmas marks the first time (in many years) that I’ve come home for the christmas holidays without a desktop. Due to lack of transport, I was limited to no more than my MEC backpack and my camera bag (which I had to bring). After attempting to play TF with sadd3j the first night, at a whopping 6-7fps (the only class I could play was engineer), and trying my brother’s desktop that had no dedicated video card, I decided, it was time to make things happen. And that meant, going to look for a video card. Because the computer is new (and not so old) I couldn’t use JasonC’s old card that Jon had as it was AGP. So I landed on this 2600XT, it’s the card sadd3j is currently using for in his macpro. Coming in at just under $70, it will be my christmas gift to my brother as he’s bored out of his mind without much to do.

(You’ll have to excuse the crappy iphone quality of the photo)

Anyway, first impression of it, it was definitely a bit step up from having no card. Comparing the performance to my imac is a better comparison. Not having the imac with me, I can only review based on memory. The card is smooth, but only when details are set to around medium, video looks noticeably better in Left4Dead than TF2. There were a few instances last night when TF2 frames dropped to 15, and began to slug down. But I’m not sure if that’s the card’s performance as it maybe more attributed to the 1gig ram in the computer. Perhaps I’ll be able to get better performance if I throw in 2 more gigs. We’ll have to see…