Navagon: [ Just out of interest, how do you know that the problem was with the CPU?
Yeah, it happens a lot. My Nvidia 260 card was great. It was my switch from ATI and it was like salvation from graphical cancer. Now the digital tumours are back...
So now I feel like I'm between a rock and a hard place. I'm actually hoping that a third option will emerge out of nowhere and knock these two muppets down a peg. Much like Nvidia did back in the day.
People worry about the future of the graphics card market. I think we're already on our way towards finding out.
Well, it was back in the mid to late 90's IIRC, and it was a cheap computer I had purchased for my son, and he was a huge Quake (or Quake 2, or Doom, dammit sorry my memory sucks) fan. And that game would simply not run on that computer, even though the specs said it should have. Constant crashes. I mean I don't think he ever played it once without it at some point crashing. And of course, I'm the parent, and I'm supposed to know the answer, and, well, I didn't know. lol And searches on the then young internets revealed known issues with that AMD CPU and Quake (or doom, or whatever). And those same searches revealed issues with other games that my son had, and well, that was enough for me. I've never had an issue with any game running an Intel (well, except for when I try to run a game that's too much for it, then it won't run lol).
I am sorry about the details if they're incorrect. I'll email my son and see if he remembers more clearly the details. Something tells me the game that really started it though was Quake. I seem to remember that game for some reason and I never played it lol.