Crossfire, here I come. Gigabyte HD6950 1GB OC (GV-R695OC-1GD)

I decided to sell of my HD5870 and buy something big – something that fit the rest of the specs of my PC. Original plan was to ditch AMD altogether. Bye bye, red team. New trend of green tech. (ironically, NVidia cards are so power inefficient.)

Checked my options. GTX580 is the fastest single GPU card. But was the performance worth the price? A good quality GTX580, in this case an Asus Direct CU II or a MSI Twin Frozr model would set me back for more than JPY40,000. Ouch! (Looking at the current exchange rates, that is a massive investment in LKR). How much performance would I be getting? 30% on average, 50% at best, except for a couple of hardcore nVidia supported games like H.A.W.X. No good! No good at all!

Of course, there are second hand cards for as cheap as JPY30,000, but with this kind of money, I didn’t wanna take the risk. Besides, there aren’t any second hand custom PCB + custom cooler models. That might be an indication of the quality of the cards, that nobody wants to sell them back. If some people are selling off their GTX580s quite cheaply, there is a good chance that I won’t like them either.