Mentor Log #5 March 21, 2013

Individual Time: 6 Hours
Running Total: 20 hours

Ohhhh lord. I'm am BEYOND happy. My graphics card FINALLY came in the mail two days ago, but I waited for my mentor to come back from a trip to be able to put it in (although it's a fairly simple process, I wanted to make sure I didn't ruin a VERY expensive piece of my computer).

So let's begin. First off, the graphics card I had in computer when I built it was a GT 420 which came out in September 2010. This card was meant to be cheep, inexpensive, and to be bought in bulk by companies (like Dell) that preinstall them in their computers. This card was given to me by a friend that recently swapped his card out. So I installed it in mine, and everything went well. I knew I just needed a bit more to save up for a better one, so I stayed put for a couple of weeks until I got a new one.

My new card that I obtained is a GTX 570. This graphics card isn't all that new (released 1 month after the 420) but wasn't designed like the 420. The 570 was made for people upgrading their graphics cards or building their own computers, which is why it is WAYYY more expensive and powerful than the 420. This card is also almost double the size of the 420. My mentor and I managed to unpack it, snip some of the cable management we had done on the computer, and installed the graphics card. This took about an hour. We then had to tie some cables down again to make the computer look neat and organized. This took about another hour and I was set to go.

My mentor left and then I sat down to work on the card some more. There are programs on the computer that let you unlock the true potential of graphics cards. These programs overclock the card so that it can perform better and faster. A way to make this understandable is if you think of it as a car. Overclocking a graphics card is like downshifting a car when you're going uphill. It will give it more power but in the long run, could damage the engine if not done properly or correctly. So I tinkered with my graphics card and overclocked it. I had to tweek up and down to get the right settings, all while running the benchmark to make sure everything is stable and not overheating. When finally done, my graphics card was able to run many of the newest games released on very very high settings if not max settings, which made me extremely happy.


Now we wait to order my new hard drive and possibly RAM to make my computer a BEAST! :D