Sunday, September 26, 2010

Final Fantasy XIV

I picked up the collector's edition of Final Fantasy XIV. I originally pre-ordered through Best Buy but they didn't have it on the day it was expected, so after a long day dealing with the customer service, cancelled and just bought it at the local GameStop.

The game was a bit buggy and really slow for me. Supposedly this is to be expected for the launch day of a new MMO. But I expected it to be a little more polished than it was. A lot of jerky motion plus quite a few crashes.

Since my video card wasn't top-notch, I went ahead and bought an upgrade (along with a new power supply) to run it. For reference to anyone with a similar machine, here's what I did:

I have a Gateway GM5632E machine and wanted to get a GTX 460 graphics card. The card recommends a power supply of 450W and this machine came with only a 400W (Delta DPS-400rb). I picked up a Corsair 650W and installed it along with the new graphics card. Everything worked perfect and I could tell a dramatic difference in FFXIV. However, after just 1 day the computer shut down. I noticed power wasn't getting to my case fan and after testing with the old power supply, verified the new power supply was toast! I returned that one and got a Corsair 750W and it has been working fine.