irresponsible upgrade

[tornadog]

I am usually a very pennywise guy and make upgrades to my pc only if neccessary. But my foray into 3d vision clouded my judgement, and I made an impulse buy yesterday. I bought a GTX 470 to replace my year old GTX 285 with the reasoning that it would let me do 3d gaming at 1920 x 1200(base resolution of my Acer 23.5" 3d monitor), and watch bluray 3d movies with hardware decoding.

Not only did I buy the new card yesterday, I put my old one for sale on Ebay and was immediately picked up using BIN. So no chance for returns or cancellations.

Its after all this transpired that I read abt the gtx 470 and it really does not offer too much of a boost for the 70 odd dollars I ended up paying. Not to mention, with my E8400 cpu and 4gb ddr2 ram, I am likely to be severly bottlenecked for performance. And for bluray 3d I have to invest another 100-200 bucks to get a compatible player like powerdvd or arcsoft tmt3.

I dont know why I am posting here, but I guess I will find some guys who can help me find solace by somehow justifying this purchase...lol

 

[Lonyo]

If you want to do 3D Vision (once you pay a little more for the glasses), the boost in performance will probably be more noticable, since the GPU will be taxed harder, so for that it might be worth it.

 

[tornadog]

i already got the nvidia 3d vision kit. That was the first step in going 3D!!!

 

[OILFIELDTRASH]

Cheap hobby. If you went and spent everything in the bank account or racked up a credit card you can't pay then yeah it's stupid. More than likely it's just an insignificant amount if money in the long run and honest cheap fun. Enjoy.

 

[nonameo]

You might be able to trade your E8400 + a little cash for a quad core which you can then overclock. 4gb of ram is enough.

 

[Leyawiin]

Cheap hobby.

That's my reasoning. Keeps me out of bars. You're just feeling a little "buyer's remorse" OP. It'll pass (and if it doesn't just sell the stuff and consider it a lesson learned).

 

[RussianSensation]

toyota here had upgraded from E8500 @ 3.8ghz and GTX260 216 to GTX470 and found the upgrade didnt' offer enough of a performance boost as well. Unfortunately, for those using 4890/GTX275/285, the current generation of videocards doesn't offer great performance boost for the $300+ the cards cost. Since you are only $70 out of pocket, that's not a bad deal for the extra 20-30% performance increase. In games like STALKER: CoP, Metro 2033, Far Cry 2, you will see an even greater boost.

You did gain the additional image quality from DX11 in Dirt 2 for example. Also, you will get a boost in minimum framerates: http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/video/display/gigabyte-gf-gtx400_8.html#sect1

 

[sxr7171]

I am usually a very pennywise guy and make upgrades to my pc only if neccessary. But my foray into 3d vision clouded my judgement, and I made an impulse buy yesterday. I bought a GTX 470 to replace my year old GTX 285 with the reasoning that it would let me do 3d gaming at 1920 x 1200(base resolution of my Acer 23.5" 3d monitor), and watch bluray 3d movies with hardware decoding.

Not only did I buy the new card yesterday, I put my old one for sale on Ebay and was immediately picked up using BIN. So no chance for returns or cancellations.

Its after all this transpired that I read abt the gtx 470 and it really does not offer too much of a boost for the 70 odd dollars I ended up paying. Not to mention, with my E8400 cpu and 4gb ddr2 ram, I am likely to be severly bottlenecked for performance. And for bluray 3d I have to invest another 100-200 bucks to get a compatible player like powerdvd or arcsoft tmt3.

I dont know why I am posting here, but I guess I will find some guys who can help me find solace by somehow justifying this purchase...lol

I'm sorry man but I personally would return it. This 3D hype is just stupid and ridiculous IMHO. It's just a way to drum up sales in a slow economy after everyone already bought their video players and TVs. Content is not ready and frankly the tech is not ready, it was just pushed out half-baked and advertised heavily. We all make impulse purchases sometimes and return policies are useful.

 

[v8envy]

Video cards don't last forever. Even if this was *zero* upgrade over your 285 you got a year's worth of newness for $70. How much value is leaking out of that 285 the longer you hold on to it?

You got an upgrade. A few more frames/sec here and there, DX11 but last and certainly nowhere NEAR least: driver optimizations which target the new rather than previous gen hardware.

Yes, we're in a video card drought which has made the current hardware performance/$ look like crap compared to last year. But what you did is certainly not terrible. $70 is a cheap hobby. And now you have a usable video card in case you decide to upgrade the rest of your rig to modern standards.