I got a new graphics card!

The older GPU was a victim of a common issue with that model: fan failure. The sleeve bearings give out due to dirt buildup and soon wear out, but not without a fight, as evidenced by all that infernal buzzing, eventually leading to heat induced death. The componant on the card which actually fails is the VRM.

The "newer" 700 series part is based on a later GPU architecture known as Kepler. Though this chip is two generations removed from today's Pascal which was preceded by Maxwell, the Kepler chip is a powerful contender even with W10 era gear. The series includes the 710, 720, 730, 740, 750, 750Ti, 760, 760Ti, 770, 770Ti, and the hog daddy, 780 and its super brother, the 780Ti. The differences in the models as you go up the ladder are CUDA cores and ROPs, along with increased clocks and RAM arrays with a corresponding need for more juice.

The 710 reference design is a half length half height fanless PCIe16X bus powered solution. This is basically an NVidia Quadro part with stuff turned off which would not be useful to consumer tasks. Third-party makers jumped in and modified things that could be enabled and added better cooling solutions, including fans, some better than others. Among the better offerings were MSI, EVGA, Gigabyte, and ASUS cards.

The 710 is considered to be an entry level workstation graphics card which can easily do the following things:

~ Desktop Publishing

~ Photography Post Work

~ Recording Studio Track Monitoring

~ Light Rendering

~ Media Streaming

~ Flow Simulation

~ Light Gaming

It can easily drive two 1920x1080 60FPS 32bit displays, although it is rated for only one without stutter in gaming sessions. The card is also useful as a second device in larger machines where it is tasked as the physics co-processor. Most modern games do not take advantage of a second GPU in this manor, however. Thus, it is only found among retro gamers who love to see it working hard doing this kind of math.

All told, this is a fine card that does not stress an older or smaller machine. It is a worthy upgrade from older cards or CPU graphics. Since the video load is removed from the CPU by this card, the entire system runs faster and cooler. It can turn a ho hum experience into a definite gosh wow good time. For making art, it is a wonderful choice at a far price while giving reliable service for a long time.