A few months ago, I removed an ASUS 6800GT from my Sony VGC-RA828G when I was doing some troubleshooting to see why my computer was crashing. The problem turned out to be some bad RAM, but in the troubleshooting process I replaced the 6800GT with the ATI X600XT which came with the Sony and never put the 6800GT back. Although the X600XT is a good mainstream card, I missed the better graphics of the 6800GT. The 6800GT ended up on my brother’s new computer at work, so if I wanted a high-end graphics card, I would have to buy a new one. Although F.E.A.R. played okay with the X600XT, I wanted a better graphics experience with future games. I purchased the MSI NX7800GT-VT2D256E because it had a decent price from Newegg of $299 after a $30 mail in rebate and bundled Call of Duty 2. My only concern in purchasing the card was that the Sony VGC-RA828G states that it has 364.7 watts max in its specs sheet, but the 6800GT worked fine, so I was hoping the 7800GT would also work. I breathed a sigh of relief when the display came up after installing the new card. After loading the MSI/Nvidia drivers, I installed Call of Duty 2 which shipped as a DVD within the MSI NX7800GT-VT2D256E box. The box wasn’t shrink-wrapped when I received it, so I think the Call of Duty 2 DVD may have been a recent addition. I’m glad I purchased Call of Duty 2 with the card because the normal game purchase has 6 CDs for installation – you only get a installation DVD with the deluxe version of Call of Duty 2. Even before I started playing Call of Duty 2, I noticed the screen seemed to be brighter and sharper than when I had the X600XT installed. Initially, Call of Duty 2 defaulted to a display of 1024×768, but I pushed it up to 1600×1200 with 4A on my 21-inch LCD screen and the game still played well. The card is quiet, and I look forward to seeing how well games will look and play with the new 7800GT. In addition to the new 7800GT, the Sony VGC-RA828G has a 3.6 GHz Intel Pentium 4 560 (Prescott), front side bus speed of 800 MHz, an Intel 915P chipset, 2 Gb of PC-3200 400 MHz DDR ram (4×512 sticks), and a 400 Gb 7200 rpm SATA drive (Hitachi).
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