It was my birthday last week (didn't share that info; not one to celebrate too much; lol). Got a $50 gift card and that, along with an additional $48 got me my new card. Some things are noticeably spiffier which happy I am. I guess 32MB vs. 1024MB makes a little difference. lol

For those curious, I got a Galaxy 520 from Best Buy. Doing my part to help the local economy but I'm sure I could have gotten a better deal online. It's CUDA capable so maybe I might try some of those CUDA required programs at Sourceforge now. Also, tried Pixel Bender (via CS5; I know; traitor I am; lol) and it's much faster; nearly instantaneous now using these plugins. Obviously haven't tried to do any real edits in GIMP yet, but don't really suspect much of a difference since GIMP doesn't really depend too much on display acceleration and display memory that I'm aware of. Still, I'm happy. That's the last hardware upgrade that was on my list. Believe I already told some folk here that I would get a new card for my Birthday.

All of my machines have nvidias in them but i'm going to get something else for my Linux comp. I'm very jealous of your 1024 meg. I hope it gives you years of happiness, seriously. I only buy a new Video board when mine dies and there aren't any in my spare board pile.

This one?

http://www.galaxytechus.com/usa/productview.aspx?id=150

Looks like a good one. nVidia has always been my choice for video cards. Linux support has been top notch. Many peeps are suggesting that ATI will lead the way in future versions of Linux but that remains to be seen. ATI has always been slow to release Linux drivers and they aren't very forthcoming with proprietary information.

Fans are always my biggest problem with video cards. The fans just don't last and they are, at times, hard to replace. The last couple of vid cards I purchased are fanless (with a big heatsink). They're quiet and much more reliable in the long run.

That's the one Tux and I do agree with you about fans, but my current system is a barebones and already 2.5 years old so don't plan on keeping it longer then another 3 years so hopefully the fan will last long enough. My PC is actually on my computer desk so the dust is low and I do clean it periodically (try for twice a year, but only cleaned it today for the first time in a year (lol), but surprisingly very little dust so happy I am with that. system is week w.r.t. today's standards (6Gs RAM, 512GByte HD, Dual AMD 2.4GHz Gigabyte MB). Still, other then one of the cheap memory modules going bad, it's been pretty much a rock solid system. I've since upgraded the 2Gs to 6Gs anyway. Got my PC as a Christmas gift from my brother (do prefer Intels, but the AMD almost makes a believer in me). Again, this was my last planned hardware upgrade and have postponed it for almost 2 years now. Said to myself that I would use Christmas money to upgrade but that didn't happen. I then said to myself maybe my birthday I'll use whatever monetary gifts for the upgrade and that I did.

I wish my video card had an HDMI port on it like your new one does.

I'm using an old GeForce4 MX 4000 with a heatsink on it, AGP at that. Surprisingly, it does an excellent job of streaming video.

Since my motherboard is so dated, I opted for a faster processor on my last upgrade. I was able to stick in a Pentium 4 @ 3.8ghz to give me the streaming performance I was looking for. Picked it up on fleabay for ~$20.00.

My next system will be based on an Intel i5 or i7, depending on available funds. I hoping I can get another year or two out of my current system.

I do wish my monitor had an HDMI port, but it's a Dell 2209wa (at the time a pretty good LCD for photo-editing to replace my aging CRT which I still miss; still a good photo-editing monitor imo and folks still want one though Dell no longer makes them as far as I understand it). It doesn't have an HDMI input unfortunately. I still have an Old 19 inch CRT TV and the only reason it still works is that my Dad uses cable (so I have a receiver box). lol

Happy be-lated B-Day Lyle and looks like you got yourself a pretty nice present for sure.
Have fun with it.

x2

Thanks for the B'Day replies. 46 now, so I can call some of you youngfry, but others here will still call me that. lol