video card shopping!

[VJ]

Ok, I called them... It went surprisingly smooth (and it did sound like I was not the first with this problem).
They already shipped a new card and the courier will take back the wrong product.

So, they solved it very nicely and efficiently.

If the previous delivery time is anything to go by, I should receive it by tomorrow evening.

[VJ]

New package is on the way.
I know it does not matter, but they can actually verify they shipped the wrong item: the shipping weight differs according to shipping company. The first (wrong) package was 1.0 kg, the one that is on the way is 1.4 kg.

edit: I just received, the card comes in a surprisingly large box (I opened it, it is the correct card, just with a lot of foam around it) which would not have fit in the box they shipped earlier. So that really puts my mind at ease that they can see they shipped me the wrong thing.

Meanwhile, the card is much more massive than I anticipated. It is a short length card, but still looks quite big. It is also very heavy, which bodes well for the heat sink. It does mean I may have to just add it to my shipment, which means I'll have to wait almost two weeks before I can install it (shipment is picked up near the end of next week and is said to be on the road 5-7 days).

[UtwigMU]

If it's any consolation: I ebayed another Supermicro X9SCM-F, Ivy Bridge 4C/8T Xeon and 32GB ECC to replace Westmere Xeon dual socket Proliant ML350 G6 ESX server (too big, noisy).

This will also make me the person with most Matrox GPUs in active use on this forum.

Due to post strike in Canada my board has been returned to seller in Korea and he'll try sending again in a week. Hope also they don't hit me with customs on all 3 items.

Wondering whether to order case from UK or Poland. They no longer make small cases for many hard drives which is what I need for server. A year ago I ebayed Fractal Design Define Mini (not C) from some shop in Poland and it was brand new. It costs 10€ more than UK though.

[VJ]

Hopefully they won't hit you with so much customs...

In Poland, I have bought some stuff at Proline.pl, but my most recent computer I bought at Caseking.de; I also have ordered hardware at jacob.de. My experience is that Poland tends to be cheaper for the cheaper hardware (or has a cheaper alternative), but more expensive for more high-end hardware (so prices are more extreme than in e.g. Germany). For sure those two German shops ship to other European countries; I've had no issues with either of them.

[VJ]

Hello!

Well, the videocard is installed and works. It really is quiet enough at any fanspeed below 75% (still not audible over the sound of the projector). Gets a bit louder after that, but still nothing problematic.

I do have a question regarding the multi-monitor setup. I used to have 1 small VGA monitor and a projector through an AV receiver (hdmi) connected to the onboard video. In the settings, it was set to output hdmi. The system behaved perfectly for me: when hdmi was not present, the system used the VGA output. So whenever the projector was off, the small display was used. And when hdmi was present, vga did not give a signal and the small monitor powered off. It even behaved like that for the bios.

Now I have it connected with the vga to onboard and hdmi to nVidia. But it does not behave like before: if the hdmi is not available, it does not display on the VGA. The nVidia does not have VGA (it has displayport, but I have no displayport-VGA dongle), so I cannot test that.

In bios, the onboard video is set as primary. If I set it as primary in Windows also, then many programs launch on that monitor (I need to check if I can circumvent that). This also happens when in the display settings the program is assigned to the nVidia card. As a test, I duplicated the monitors and that works - suprisingly does not give a noticable performance hit in the game I tried. So that is a viable workaround, but I prefer the old layout (the small monitor switched off, so it did not cause distractions - I can switch it off manually but it was easier before ).


Any idea how I can get a similar behaviour as before?