There are distinct generations when it comes to building computers. At the dawn of desktop pc building parts were often difficult to obtain and their rarity made it easy to determine what you needed to buy. As the market segment grew so did the hardware vendors offering parts. What was once a bare motherboard now included onboard audio and network adaptors to help with sales and video cards would entice consumers by including full access games that would often showcase a new technology supported by the hardware.
Somewhere along this path things took a side step. Cases that were great for modding now were rattle traps assembled by the lowest bidder to maximize profits. Motherboards started to diversify with hundreds of different skus designed for different markets around the world. None of them were good but reflected where that region was when it came to how they used computers.
The modern gaming video card was segmented by how well it could process video. Eventually that processing was moved from the CPU to a GPU and the race to get the best performance was born. NVIDIA would often lead the pack first offering dual monitor setups and later offering SLI as a way to link video cards together for better performance. Somewhere along the line overclocking started to become a viable option to increase performance. Board partners were given the freedom to design cards how they wanted and many of them took things to the extreme.
One such card was the EVGA GTX 580 Classified. This card was a special design that could be completely unlocked meaning that no over current protections would be in place, voltages could be set extremely high and it was designed to run cold. Those things allowed the card to be overclocked with LN2 and some would say it was the last great video card ever to exist.
Truth is ASUS and MSI both offered similar cards for the GTX 580 and they all suffered the wrath of NVIDIA and marked the beginning of the end. From that point forward features started to be taken away, overclocking became more difficult and we are left with a shadow of a GPU that is completely locked with a factory overclock and no way to change anything.
It is perfect
Related Links
EVGA GTX 580 Classified
Hardware Asylum at Hackfort 2019
Episode 109 featured music:
Little People - Start Shootin' (http://www.littlepeoplemusic.com/)
