[d0od]

Okay, so i was looking for a graphics card and bought this.

I'm not a "gamer" - in fact the most recent game i bought requires a minimum of 90mhz processor.... so...

Anyway, i wanted one kinda to improve second life. and mebbe if i decided to try games in the future have a bit more oomph.. though i'm hardly gonna be playing something like crysis 2 or anything...

So i bought this - partly cos it was nvida - and my on board "chipset" or whatever it's called was by them and served me pretty well... and cos it seemed a reasonable price, the 1gb RAM was only a bonus... i would've settled for 512..

anyway - I've "installed" it - yet... my desktop looks very different - icons aren't' as sharp, the colour seems a bit dull, and secondlife seems no quicker to load environments, or make them look any better than before. In fact, everything seems a little slower. I have a 500w PSU so it's not lack of power, i have a AMD 3500+ processor which coped fine with everything i did - aftereffects, premier, secondlife, firefox, window blinds, rk launcher etc but ... even the desktop background looks less "Realistic" than before. I've ran thru nvida's manager thingy and done the optimization tests... played around with my monitor aswell... but it all still looks a bit.. different.

HAve i bought a dud [yeah, bear in mind i wasn't looking for a £500+ super core memory blasting billion pixel rendering engine-come-ai card lol] i was looking for something for around £50 [$100] and i bought this. should it be performing better?
What about any stable over clocking or things?

[Gazmondo]

So you've installed this new graphics card and everything you see now on your monitor is no longer as "sharp"? (to put it in basic terms).

Graphics drivers can be stubborn sometimes, try un-installing every graphics driver you've currently installed, and make sure that they are all gone before installing the drivers for your new card.

[d0od]

okay - i will try that, thanks.

[ i might just be seeign whats not there... y'know?]

[Carbon]

SL is one of the most horribly coded pieces of junk software ever invented. Don't expect much.

[Macmac508]

Definitely sounds like a driver issue. The 8500GT is not a poor card for the things that you are doing and should give ok results.

Have you updated the drivers since you bought the card?

[redden137]

The 8500 gt is not a bad card m8, id also suggest uninstalling the nvidia drivers for your card and then download the lastest drivers from here NVIDIA Drivers