Prompted by a post by Iain about his new machine, I finally got round to buying a new graphics card to go along with mine. After roughly 5 mins looking at Overclockers.co.uk (which Iain pointed me to when I asked him about his card), I had my Switch card out, and was reducing my bank balance. On Friday afternoon, my shiny new MSI Geforce NX6800GT (256M, AGP) arrived.

Having never owned a high end card before, I've still not quite come to terms with the situation. I can run new games at 1280x1024 with all the eye candy turned on! I may even get round to reinstalling Doom 3, which may run slightly better than 5 fps at 800x600 with the lowest settings.

The obligatory run of 3D Mark 2005 gives a very respectable score of 4783, which although nice, doesn't really mean anything in the real world. Needless to say though, Far Cry, Half Life 2, etc. run significantly more smoothly. Undoubtedly I'll be installing quite a few older games, just so that I can crank up the settings and resolution. A productive use of my time, I reckon...