Well, poop. Blastoise just can’t win when it comes to games.
Ever since I cleared the first Mass Effect, it’s been back to the usual MMOs until I can get the dude another SSD or something to act as additional app storage. Only then I started having driver issues up the nose, and it only got progressively worse until today.
The 285 driver made YouTube pretty much unusable (most videos would “Green Out”), but 296.10 was even worse– couldn’t play games OR run any kind of video without Blastoise totally upending himself and forcing a hard reboot. Running the beta driver (300-something) kinda stabilized things but not by much. So I went back to the 270 driver that the card came with.
Plan B entailed diving into the settings for underclocking. Now… OCing/UCing is territory I don’t wander into since I figured it’s best not to try to reinvent the wheel, but this particular card (the Galaxy MDT GTX570) is factory overclocked, and it was suggested I manually ratchet it back to the default clock speed. That appeared to work for City of Heroes on the short term, but had catastrophic results for WoW, which would just crash outright after character select.
Oh hell. This had to happen on a raid night, too. Thankfully Dinah the Badass Ninja MacBook is always ready to step in, but…. yeah.
The fact that I’m even having to take such arcane measures to whip MMOs into submission (and they’re pretty low on the gaming food chain) should be signal enough that something has gone REALLY bad in this card. At least unlike the previous, I still have basic Windows and video playback usability, but I’m a couple days out the return window at Amazon so I’m kinda SOL there. :(
At this point I would just say “f you nVidia” and go back to ATI, but I still don’t have any love for bloaty Catalyst. Aaargh. I’m already looking at having to pay the Stupid Geek Tax again since this will be Blastoise’s second video card replacement and this form is barely 5 months old.
On the flipside? Whatever I loot this time will give me back twin monitor functionality. Good lord I’ve missed that. T_T
Tags: blastoise, broken parts suck