Well, I got screwed and it's WAY too late to do anything about it.
I know this is a problem with brick and mortar retail stores, as I have experienced it, twice now. I worked at a car audio installation/retail outlet. A customer brought in an open box CD player to install, bought from Wal Mart. Well, I opened it, and the CD player was about 10 years older than the one that was supposed to be in the box. Customer was enraged.
Almost 2 years ago, I bought an XFX 7850 2GB Black Edition from Best Buy. It didn't look like an open box, everything looked good so I installed it. Games played much much better than my older 1GB 9800GT OC, so I thought everything was a-okay. Never checked the ram or system ram usage specs or anything like that, until today. Now I am enraged! Catalyst reports the card as only having 1024mb. DXDiag reports only 728mb usable. And so now it's all starting to make sense as to why I haven't been getting the performance I've expected from it!
I threw away the box along with the receipt a long time ago and it's obviously way too late to do anything about it now, so lesson learned! Be wary of brick and mortar retail stores! What is says on the box is not always what's in the box!
And before anyone asks, I know for a fact that I purchased the 2gb version, as it was what I was in the market for, something with 2gb memory to run GTA4 maxed out. Well, now it's obvious why I couldn't! And I feel like such an idiot for not checking sooner! And now I'm in the market for a new video card, AGAIN. GRRR.
And while I'm here, I may as well ask a question. What would be a good GPU to go with an AMD FX8320?
I know this is a problem with brick and mortar retail stores, as I have experienced it, twice now. I worked at a car audio installation/retail outlet. A customer brought in an open box CD player to install, bought from Wal Mart. Well, I opened it, and the CD player was about 10 years older than the one that was supposed to be in the box. Customer was enraged.
Almost 2 years ago, I bought an XFX 7850 2GB Black Edition from Best Buy. It didn't look like an open box, everything looked good so I installed it. Games played much much better than my older 1GB 9800GT OC, so I thought everything was a-okay. Never checked the ram or system ram usage specs or anything like that, until today. Now I am enraged! Catalyst reports the card as only having 1024mb. DXDiag reports only 728mb usable. And so now it's all starting to make sense as to why I haven't been getting the performance I've expected from it!
I threw away the box along with the receipt a long time ago and it's obviously way too late to do anything about it now, so lesson learned! Be wary of brick and mortar retail stores! What is says on the box is not always what's in the box!
And before anyone asks, I know for a fact that I purchased the 2gb version, as it was what I was in the market for, something with 2gb memory to run GTA4 maxed out. Well, now it's obvious why I couldn't! And I feel like such an idiot for not checking sooner! And now I'm in the market for a new video card, AGAIN. GRRR.
And while I'm here, I may as well ask a question. What would be a good GPU to go with an AMD FX8320?