Asus STRIX GTX 980 \o/

It’s finally here!

As a long long time user of Second Life, if you’re still using a video card with only 1GB (or less) you seriously need to upgrade to something with more. When I pre-ordered my GTX 980, I installed bench-marking software and monitoring tools that helped me better understand the hardware I have before my GTX 980 arrived.

Using GPU-Z and running one instance of Firestorm on SL, the viewer and the OS overhead was using about 800mb of my  old video card’s VRAM, out it’s 1GB of VDDR5 memory. So if you were using an older 512mb video card, your performance was already suffering just using one instance of an SL viewer.  I then realized that this is why when I run a second instance of Firestorm, that I had to minimize one of them (or cam out into the void so nothing renders) in order for the viewer that has focus not to bog down it’s frame rates.

When my new video card arrived, it has 4GB of VDDR5 RAM, and I quickly fired up FOUR instance of Firestorm, logged in four ALTs and none of the viewers had any framerate issues (except for when it doesn’t have focus FPS drops, which is meant to do that) but there was no drop in framerate with the viewer that currently was in focus. I could alt-tab to another viewer and no loss in quality. AND i had everything set to ULTRA settings.

So while getting a GTX 980 is overkill for Second Life, getting a video card with 2GB VRAM or more IS advisable if you’re using multiple alts on SL at the same time. So something like a GTX 750 ti which has 2GB of VRAM ($160) would be useful over any old videocard that only has 1GB.

The elusive ASUS STRIX GTX 980 and Amazon

Amazon never had any ASUS STRIX GTX 980 in stock since mid October. They started pre-orders around October 30^th, which is when I made my pre-order. Nvidia started a new free game promotion when you purchase a GTX 980 card the following week. Amazon is participating in this promotion.

Since the promotion started after I made my pre-order, I asked customer service if my order will qualify for this promotion, since I technically hadn’t bought it yet since it hasn’t shipped yet, nor was I billed yet. They said it wasn’t because I made the order (a PRE order) on the 30^th outside of the promotional period. I was TOLD by Amazon customer support I had the option to cancel my original order and re-pre-order it again to qualify for the free game. They offered free 1 day shipping as compensation. So reluctantly that’s what I did on November 8^th.

Now a week passes and my video card has finally shipped! (yay!) Only after waiting over TWO WEEKS since my original October 30^th PRE-order, but I didn’t get my free game code. I asked Amazon customer support AGAIN about this and they simply said it wasn’t apart of the promotion simply because the item listed on amazon isn’t marked with that promotion. WTF?

This is bullshit. Amazon is participating in this promotion, I bought the video card FROM amazon, BILLED by amazon on November 13th. Nvidia lists Amazon as one of the vendors participating in this promotion. I almost bought an eVGA GTX 980 card because they were in stock, and I was getting tired of waiting. Granted the STRIX GTX 980 didn’t display this promotion in it’s item listing but that’s ONLY because they never had this video card in stock for the past four weeks, long BEFORE the promotion started. You could only pre-order it. Even now it’s still NOT not in stock, but now you CAN’T pre-order it anymore. All Amazon shows now is a 3rd party store selling the card WAY OVER PRICED.

The only compensation they gave me was free 1 day shipping, but it shipped on a FRIDAY I’m not going to get it till MONDAY. They offered this only if I canceled and re-ordered it so i could get my free game, but that was all for nothing.. What a waste of fucking time dealing with Amazon customer support for something I clearly qualify for but I do not due to some stupid technicality. Even my “compensation” wasn’t even worth the time and hassle.

TOTAL BULLSHIT AMAZON! I think i’ll stick with NewEgg when comes to PC hardware purchases, but keep buying mundane commodities like toilet paper from Amazon.