Graham and the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad video card

[gchpaco]

Many moons ago, I bought a PC for the express purpose of playing City of Heroes. I enjoyed the game a great deal and played incessantly, but in time I found that my mindless MMORPGing was being impaired by my bargain basement video card. Thus, I desired to upgrade, and in particular I thought that I would buy a decent nVidia card.

Enter the nVidia 6600.

From the moment I got it home and out of its shiny, candy like packaging and put it into my computer this card has had it in for me. Typical symptoms are it will periodically lock the computer up cold with no warning whatsoever. This happens more frequently with intense 3D graphics but once happened running Memtest86.

I decided it was overheating and bought an enormous fan to blow straight onto it. It locked up anyway. So I bought a second fan. It locked up anyway. So I bought a third fan and ran with the side of the computer off and an enormous box fan blowing straight into it. This time it burned down, fell over, and then sank into the swamplocked up.

I tried running Linux. Less frequent but still happened. I upgraded the drivers. Still happened. I thought maybe it was the RAM and ran with one stick. Still happened. Other stick. Still happened. Blew the dust out of the fans. Still happened. Upgraded the CPU fan. Still happened. Upgraded the power supply. Still happened. Turned all the graphical shininess I had bought the card for off. Still happened.

The last straw was tonight, where it locked up on me six times in the space of an hour. Once CoH didn't even make it to the login screen.

When the devil and his majordomo had a child, that child was so ugly it broke the universe. And this video card was the afterbirth. Those look like copper traces but really they are solidified hate, powered by the fires of hell itself routing elemental particles of frustration from some infinite fount into the rest of my darling computer, poisoning it from the inside. Not even liquid nitrogen could quench its burning loathing for mankind. When I rip it out of my computer, still trailing the gossamer threads with which it has infested my case, I am going to put it in its packaging and then put that into a lead box and seal it with unicorn blood and the tears of a saint and then put that into a car that I will put into a shipping container that I will put on a ship that I will sail into the Pacific, over the Mariana Trench, and then I will blow the ship up and watch in a submersible to be sure that this vile thing returns back to the center of the earth whence it came to ensure that it will afflict no other human beings.

And I defy anyone to argue that this is somehow unreasonable.