Here we go.....my score for my HD 5770 mod.
Bit of background first.
I bought this card about 2 1/2 years ago, it cost me £ 50.00 on ebay second hand, i already had a HD 5750, i fancied a crack at crossfire and the 5770 was a good price. So thats what i did, i put both cards on a Giga 880g and crossfired, i was disappointed with the results, i am not a big gamer, nothing too demanding, driving mainly (NFS).
Where i was getting 30fps with the 5750 when i added the 5770 i was only getting 40 fps so i abandoned the Xfire thing, put the 5750 in my sons pc and kept the better card for myself.
Fine, hunky dory, then the specs for GTA V came out and i really wanted to be able to enjoy the game with reasonable FPS. I bought an HD 5850 for the bargain price of £ 12.50 ( I am a skint Welshman, long term sick, and no money.) and put it in my main pc......nothing fancy, in my specs an o/c on a quad core athlon with 8 gbs ram (plays GTA V 30 fps).
This left me with a "redundant" HD 5770.
I own several other pcs, including a dedicated cruncher called ThugXeon, just crunches...its a 4 core Xeon chip with H/T........8 threads running at 2.5ghz 24/7.
I saw a thread on TPU.......it ended up as a bit of a cockfight actually, members argued about i5...i7 , cores, threads, speeds, a mod stepped in and things calmed down. But it got me thinking.....i could install GTA V on both these machines, give them both 8gb RAM and do a comparison, watching FPS, task manager, GPUZ and all the fun stuff that gets me going.
So that was the aim, put the 5770 on a Supermicro X8sti with a Xeon E5620, d/l GTA to the hdd and then do a comparison and a report.
I know the 2 machines arnet comparable really but I am an enthiusiast so the result isnt really too important.......the process to get there is the best bit.......if comparisons can be made or conclusions drawn then great.
Right back to the card.
When it arrived it was nice and clean, looked well looked after but we burn coal and other stuff in our house so it wasnt long before it needed a clean. It had obviously been cleaned before because one of the screws was missing....so what, one screw missing, at least it has been maintained well.
So i dusted it and put it back together, unfortunatley i didnt mark which hole was missing a screw so when i put it back together it rattled.........shit.....time for tape.
I didnt demonstrate when i first showed the mod and this is where i start piling on the points......
see the silver tape? i found that on the side of the road, it is the reflective stuff they stick around the side of road signs....look closely, you might recognize it.
That was the first attempt, sticky tape and it worked fine until the card got nice and warm, the glue turned sticky and the fan casing kind of drooped a bit. BOLLOCKS.
I though at this point i might have to spend some money.......nah.... lets try the cable tie route. It only took 2 out of a bag of 100 i bought for £ 1.00.
WAHEY... fixed, working, temps are good. The tape is now baked on to the card so i cant get it off without a solvent and that is in my shed somewhere.
I have already shown the pic where i removed the locking tab so i wont add that pic here........now it is time for points.
Technical 6 it took a strong heart to rip that bit of plastic off
Stuff 10 cost 2p and included rubbish from the roadside.
Finesse 5
Attempts 5 took about an hour.......3 stabs at it
Result 10 works perfectly
that gives me 36 points but this is where i play my trump card to pile on a hefty dose of kudos points.
When i posted my card mod on 4 th May, i felt as if it might be seen as a slur on the good name of XFX and just by chance i noticed that the guy from
@XFXSupport was on line so i thought i had better make some sort of apology, a gentle warning if you like that something quite gross had happenned. It would have been quite shocking for him if he stumbled across the pics. I really didnt want to make him cry or upset him.
So, i pm 'd him with the title "Hope you dont mind" and i copied the pics to the email.
Guess what?.......the lovely fellow actually replied.....better still he liked it..
( he didnt really express it in many words but i felt a kind of www warmness eminate from my monitor.)
The phrase LOL was mentioned....i think he meant to type COOL and used the wrong letters.
Oh Yeah KUDOS POINTS FOR ME 10 of them
So for this mod
I have genorously award myself 46 points
feel free to call me out
