My last experience dealing with PC components and parts goes all the way back during college and university days. I was an avid gamer and spending countless of hours in front of a computer was what I did, mostly playing games and of course the occasional visit to the local cybercafes. But when it came to computers, I learned the hard way back in the day to dissamble a PC, learned to choose the right components and dabbled in a little bit of overclocking (on an old Athlon processor).
To me as a student, overclocking was a way to draw out more power from my computer in order to play games without spending too much on expensive components. I experimented with different thermal pastes at the time, played once with a water cooling system which was a little on the manual side which I neglected until all of the water in the loop evaporated as I didn’t refill the reservoir.
One of my fun accomplishments back in Sheffield was to leave my PC case at the window sill (it helped that my desk faced a window in the room) and I left the side panel open in order for the cold air outside (during the peak of winter it was below zero) and I could hit speeds on my CPU with just an air cooler and for it to be still stable.
Twenty years later, here I am again, this time around not really going into overclocking but just tinkering around with a PC.
I recently purchased the GALAX GeForce RTX 3080 Ti via Shopee (because all the shops were closed due to lockdown). By instinct normaly I would just get the GPU from the shop and asked them to install it for me but in this case, I wasn’t able to do that. So thanks to the situation, I got a box to unbox.
Inside the box is another box which was black and dull.
Upon opening the box, I was wondering, what the heck was this. Was it a water block? What does it do? As of the time of writing this post, I still have no clue what it is but I guess it has something to do with RGB lighting. Honestly being the super macho man I think I am, I completed ignored the manual (RTFM!!!!) and as tempted as I am now to just Google it, I think I shall wait a week before I continue figuring it out.
There was also an additional fan which came along with the fancy transparent thingamajig so I was wondering what it was for. Looking at the transparent fan blades led to me think that it would probably showcase some funky RGB lighting to it. I wonder how did this old RGB colour nonsense start getting popular.
Below all of the other fancy stuff would be the GPU itself which was huge! Larger than the current GPU in my PC at the moment with its triple fan blade design. This RTX 3080 Ti looks chunky and I was wondering at the time if my mid-sized ATX case could fit it.
And voila, here is the RTX 3080 Ti, a large card which should help me kill more baddies in Warzone and also grant me a smooth gameplay and experience. Alternatively, if you looked at the right side of the card with the hexagon cutouts, that is where the extra fan is supposed to be attached. It works on clips, so you don’t need to screw it in.
So there you have it, something simple yet super difficult to find as miners around the world are hogging all the GPU stock. Thanks to this, I have a spare Zotac GTX 1080 GPU now so do contact me if you are interested in the card. Otherwise I might use it for another PC build.
My next post is going to be me attempting to swap out my old Zotac GTX 1080 graphics card as well as the power supply unit (PSU). Stay tuned for that.
