I got a rude surprise when I booted up my desktop this morning and its graphics card — of slightly unusual provenance — shat the bed. That card had been randomly crashing once or twice a month since I’d installed it, but I couldn’t pin down a precise cause (or in fact trace the crash all the way to the GPU — proximate cause isn’t ultimate cause, after all). This gives me a better idea of what was going on: I bet a memory module was dodgy, and finally decided that it just couldn’t take another power-on cycle.
So, okay, I can cope with this. Stuck in subsuburbia with only a bus pass and no time to visit my favourite hardware store, I hopped down to a nearby Best Buy and picked up a PNY 9800 GT. On paper, it makes a nice upgrade from my 8800 GTX — less space, less heat, less power consumption, and more horsepower besides.
Only problem is that this particular copy doesn’t produce any DVI output.
Fuck!
Looks like I get to go back to Best Buy — receipt and card-in-original-packaging in hand — and see about exchanging the thing for another copy. I have a sinking feeling that this is going to end with me eating the cost of the PNY card and buying the ASUS card from ATIC that I should have gone for in the first place.
Blunt Object 
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