A few days ago the fan on one of the XFX nVidia GeForce 8800GS Alpha Dog cards in my gaming rig died. There are a pair of them in a SLI configuration and when the fan died on one, it overheated and shut down the system. As a safe gaurd, the system would not turn on with the bad card installed.

At first I thought it was the power supply. I got a RMA on the Ultra 650W power supply and got a 750W upgrade. After replacing the PS, the system would still not even post. So as part of troubleshooting, I stripped the system down to minimum components (No hard drive, single memory stick, one video card). The system booted with one video card installed, and started beeping at me with the other card installed.

I contacted XFX to get my 1 year old video card replaced/fixed. I an RMA for the card and XFX determined it was a faulty card. No sooner that I got the email from XFX about the faultly card, the other card went bad. I actually heard the fan come to a screeching halt. XFX informed me that they no longer make the 8800GS card and offered me a free upgrade to the GeForce 9800GT! Before they even knew the second card went south, XFX offered a free RMA upgrade to a 9800GT for the second card since they were in an SLI configuration. So kudos to XFX for standing behind their products and offering great service.

If you have purchased a graphic intensive PC game recently, such as Cryisis, you realize that  your computer runs the game like a choppy YouTube video. In order to get a better gaming experience you need to get the latest hardware, so a $60 game may end up costing you hundreds in hardware upgrades.

Years ago when computing power was extraordinarily expensive, you had a server like a mainframe do all the number crunching serve out results to “dumb” terminals.  What if the graphics and physics calculations of today’s games were subcontracted to servers that did the heavy lifting. As computer power reaches pennies per Ghz and unlimited internet bandwidth increases steadily, the next evolution in gaming is in game streaming and subscription.

Imagine subscribing to  the latest graphically intensive game that just came out over the internet. With the streaming model, video is streamed to your desktop while the game is running on a remote server at high resolution and with high game details on. That means your PC doesn’t have to run the latest hardware to play the game the way it was meant to be played. A recent article has revealed the OnLive will attempt do just that.

Of course this would only work if you have the bandwidth to support it. The internet backbones are currently being upgraded, but higher internet speeds will likely cost you more as well. Another road block would be the ISP’s proposed cap on your monthly bandwitdh. If the unlimited internet bandwitdh model changes, entire business built on internet communcations will suffer, including the upcoming game streaming.

Hopefully some good news, better late than never. In an article from Edge Online Microsoft’s Product manager Aarron Greenberg, stated that they have put the RRoD issues behind them. They have found the hardware issue and have resolved them in the newest hardware revision call Jasper that came out in Xbox 360′s late last year.

It might just be safe to go out an buy an Xbox 360 even if you have been burned in the past. I would like to know if anyone else has had any issues with the new Jasper hardware.