Hello, this is my first post in my blog . This blog will cover IT world and technology advancement in my point of view. There will also reviews of many IT products such as PC components, Mobile Phone, etc that I buy and use. This first post will cover how IT world has changed so fast that we as the customer at least in my point of view feels that our money to buy high end products is just such a waste. Especially for people in my country (Indonesia) where the gap between the rich and the poor is so large that you can even see the very poor and the very rich people live just across each other. Well back to the topic, I want to cover about graphic card. My first PC had a Voodoo 2 12MB card in it. At that time (I can't even remember what year ) I bought the card for Rp. 1.500.000 and the only game that I played was just G-Police. I am very proud with myself because among my friends I am the only one who had a hardware graphic accelerated PC. But after 3 years my Voodoo is broken and I have to ditch my PC altogether because the Voodoo card short-circuited my motherboard My next graphic card alongside my brand-new -at that time- Pentium III 733Mhz with 256MB of SDRAM is.. Asus GeForce 2 GTS 64MB and an Asus DVD-ROM 8x.  Quite High end at that time… I was quite satisfied with my PC, until Asus' Graphic card cannot gave me decent frame rates in games that I love to play like Colin McRae Rally 3 and my DVD-ROM refuse to read many DVDs just after 1.5 years. So… bye-bye ASUS… I will never use any ASUS component in my PC ever again! My next PC is using Pentium 4 1.9GHz in socket 478. That is almost highest end model at that time, coupled with 512MB of RDRAM and Sony 16x DVD-ROM Drive + Teac CD-RW 24x. This time my Graphic card is Coming from Leadtek Winfast GeForce 3 Ti200 128MB. Well at that time my card has very good price/performance ratio than the top model GeForce 3 Ti500. I started to fell in love with games like Age Of Mythology and Age of Empires II. I intentionally upgraded my monitor from AOC 15" to Viewsonic E70f Flat 17" CRT monitor just to make my graphic card sweat to game in 1024×768 resolution with decent refresh rates. Well…. what do you know… my card fail on me after just a little more than 1 year… everytime I play Age Of Mythology for more than 15 minutes, my PC crashed… I was so mad when I found out that the source of the problem is failing cooling fan on the card that it burnt my Graphic card chip to the extend of non-repairable! OMG… since then I never use any products whatsoever from Leadtek. Sigh… After bad encounter with those graphic card, my next PC is equipped with P4 "C" 3.0GHz with 1GB of Corsair DDR400 and an Asus mainboard (wrong decision, after my promise of never touched ASUS product ever again) my graphic card is Gigabyte Radeon 9800 Pro 128MB. I chose ATI because at that time there are many rumors that NVIDIA is cheating to get higher score for 3DMark, plus ATI beat the crap out of anything NVIDIA has to offer (GeForce 5000 and 6000 series anyone? ) I was so happy with my PC that I decided to upgrade my monitor once more from Viewsonic E70f to Viewsonic P90f Pure Flat 19" CRT. Well… same old story… my Asus P4C800 mainboard once again went up in smokes. the capacitor is burnt after about 1.5 years (since then I absolutely never use any of Asus' product in my PC) mind you I do use my PC A LOT, and my PC always on for like 20 hours a day, but still I use a decent Enlight casing with 4 fans, so it wouldn't be a problem for the airflow to cool the capacitor right? After REALLY bad experience with ASUS, its time to upgrade my PC. Now I use AMD Athlon 64 3500+ Overclocked to 2.8GHz with the help of Zalman 9500 CNPS and Abit AN8 Ultra motherboard. I bought ATI X1800XT 512 MB for a crazy price of USD540! upgrade my memory to Mushkin Enhanced 2GB DDR 400 and my PSU to Enlight 500W. Now in just 3 months of fine gaming, ATI decided to launch X1900XT and X1950XTX just short after, which make me shell another USD 500 for X1950XTX 512MB! man I was quite pissed about upgrading my graphic card this often, but games like Need For Speed Most Wanted really pushed me to upgrade it, because I played in 1600×1200 resolution with 4x AA and 8x AF all the time! sigh… Now after many years of enjoyable experience, Age Of Empires III actually made me upgrade to my newest PC that consist of Intel Quadcore Q6600 Overclocked to 3.6 GHz with the help of Scythe Infinity and 4 GB of Corsair DDR2 800 in an Abit IX38 Quad GT mainboard. my graphic card of choice is GeForce 9800 GTX 512 MB which I bought for USD 410… which then leads me to upgrade yet again my 19" CRT monitor to Samsung 206BW 20" Widescreen LCD to play a smooth game experience in 1680 x 1050 resolution… However just after 4 months of using it to play games like Crysis, Call Of Duty 4, World In Conflict, etc, NVIDIA released the newly crazy GeForce GTX 280 1GB that is sold for about USD 599. crazy huh? I was going to buy it soon but after read many reviews I decided to go with AMD/ATI latest offering the Radeon 4870 512 MB which has MUCH better price/performance ratio than the GTX 280. So in conclusion, yeah… I think for a casual PC user or a casual gamer… IT world do advanced too fast… as customer are "forced" to buy new Intel Processor and NVIDIA or AMD/ATI graphic card every 6 months just to keep with the latest technology… but for a hardcore gamer such as myself…. the advancement just mean 1 think and 1 think only… faster performance with in latest and new games with all the graphic setting set to the max! although I have to work like crazy to compensate my graphic card rampage )