Martin Geisler Online

Having decided on a gorgeous 30-inch Dell 3007WFP, the next question is: what kind of graphics card should I buy to drive it? My current card is a Nvidia GeForce 6500 with no dual-link DVI output, so I have to upgrade. About the dual-link DVI: a normal DVI connection has the bandwidth to output images of size up to 1920×1200, but I need 2560×1600… Luckily someone invented dual-link DVI which doubles the bandwidth. This should not be confused with having two single-link DVI connections on the same card. Of those cards with two DVI connections, some have one dual-link and one single-link DVI. There are also high-end cards with two dual-link connections. Nvidia has a list of dual-link DVI cards online.

I don’t plan to do lots of 3D graphics, so I don’t need a particular fast card, the only requirement is that it has dual-link DVI. And it should preferrable be without a fan. AnandTech recently had a story on fan-less graphics cards where they concluded that a Gigabyte 7600 GS/GT gave a good performance. They of course tested it mostly for 3D performance, but I need 2D performance. How much of a difference are there between modern graphics cards in 2D performance?

Please give me your suggestions.

A big one this time… :-) Look for yourself:

I’ve finally done it — I’ve bought the Dell UltraSharp3007WFP LCD! This is a 30″ flat panel monitor, a bit more than two times as big as the 20″ LCD I have now. The resolution is 2560×1600 pixels compared to 1600×1200 before. Wow! :-)

I’ve been lurking around it for quite some time now, and yesterday I discovered that Dell has put it on sale here in Denmark: 25% off so it now costs just 11,500 DKK. So I placed an order :-)

The sad thing is that they say it will take at least three weeks for it to be delivered :-(

I was just playing around with my home banking… I exported the data for the last year to OOCalc and filtered it based on the descriptive text associated with each entry. So I discovered that I’ve spend no less than 8,897.67 DKK (roughly 1,500 USD or 1,200 EUR) in the FøTeX in Storcenter Nord! And that’s for the last six months only since I was in Switzerland until Marts this year.

Spending almost 9,000 kroners on 51 shopping sprees is an average of 175 DKK per visit. Auch — FøTeX is an expensive place to enter! Comparing FøTeX to some of the cheaper super markeds I see that both Netto and Fakta average around 130 DKK per visit for me. So I could probably save some money by shopping there more often.

These statistics are wrong by an unknow factor since they only reflect the spendings I’ve made with my credit card (Dankort). So the “score” for FøTeX would be even higher if one included all the little visits I’ve made where I paid with cash. They also include the stuff I’ve bought for our lunch club, which might help to explain the many expensive visits made to FøTeX.

You’ve seen the first part, now enjoy the second, this time with a real coke explosion:

As promissed earlier, here’s some more info about the happy day when our local mall, Nordcenter Stor, finally completed the expansion.

Hmm… this actually has nothing to do with the Nordcenter, expect for the fact that the coke and mentos was bought there. Anyway, enjoy the movie: