A little while ago, I swapped out RamblingEpic’s old PC case for a Bitfenix Merc Alpha & added a new power supply when the old one split up the side (never good, right?!) and started making a God-awful vibrating noise! Since then, we’d done everything we could to source and solve the small whine from his graphics card. The culprit has eluded us to this day, but currently at best guess, it’s something on the inside of the small fan included on the cooler attached. I’ve had the heatsink off completely, the fan’s been painstakingly cleaned out several times until completely spotless and yet the noise remained. We were happy enough leaving the card in as performance wasn’t being affected and it was apparently something RamblingEpic could live with – not so sure I could’ve done the same if it had to sit right next to me!
At the end of October, completely randomly, the whine suddenly evolved into an all-out mechanical cranking noise! Fearing any sort of proper damage, we removed the graphics card altogether and finally caved in on buying a new card. Time to say a fond farewell to the Asus Nvidia ENGT 220 1GB DDR3 and welcome the next phase of RamblingEpic’s gaming!
Tadaa! Welcome the Sapphire Radeon HD 7750 with 1GB DDR5! This card’s a little beast for the money. Don’t think it’ll max out every high end game out there, but it delivers nicely for everything we need and was less than £80.
The Sapphire HD 7750 features DVI, HDMI and mini-display outputs (pictured). With these ports and the cooling attached, the card takes up 2 PCI slots, but still looks neat and tidy once installed. It definitely won’t take up space in your system like the latest HD7900 series! 😛
There’s not much else to say about it really. The 7750’s been awesome for a budget area card, it handles Warcraft, Minecraft and more recently Guild Wars 2 with ease and always delivers a sweet framerate to keep the gaming experience smooth. The fan is MUCH more quiet than its predecessor, but then again how hard would that have been toward the end? 🙂 If you’re looking for a budget card to enjoy some decent gaming without breaking the bank, go for it!
I’m new to your blog and was wondering how you’ve found the 7750 card after all this time? I’m thinking of getting one and don’t want to buy too cheaply if it will mean I get less life out of the card.
Hi there, apologies for the time taken to approve your comment. I’d come up with a worthy excuse, but in all honesty I’ve just been blonde and missed the few new ones awaiting moderation! Sorry!
The 7750’s been great so far, RamblingEpic’s had no complaints and he’s been hitting up GW2 pretty heavily in the last 2 months. It’s doing much better than my kinda dated 9600GTs in SLI! Good for a budget gaming system, or a beefy HTPC with some gaming on the side. Glad we have one. 🙂