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What was the 'worst' video card you ever owned....?

iv-tecman

iv-tecman

iv-tecman

Soldato
Joined
12 May 2005
Posts
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We’ve had the most successful card but what about the worst card or one of the ones you wish you’d not touched?

I think for me, it has to be the ATI all in wonder with the RAGE 3D chipset. Thankfully I had it installed along with a 3Dfx voodoo II so the 3Dfx dealt with the games, even though I tried 3D on the ATI RAGE 3D it was pathetic. And the TV Tuner wasn’t much good either.

I also think for me, honourable mention is the Power VR x2. simply as by the time NEC /Videologic had fixed the bilinear filtering of the first Power VR card the 3Dfx had simply trampled all over it. I never really used mine for much gaming and removed it in favour of a 3Dfx Voodoo add on card.

Since those days always been very careful to which card I’ve purchased and only had what I feel to be worthy cards such as –

ATI Radeon 9700 Pro
NVIDIA 8800GTX
ATI 5870
 
My powerVR, in hindsight is was a bit rubbish and a bitch to work with,

But it was my first ever 3d card and i was overally impressed back then!
 
ATi 8500 LE -- Absolutely terrible drivers. Pretty much every single game out didn't work properly with it at launch. C&C Renegade had huge areas of missing textures. Day of Defeat you could see through walls (quite useful!). Other games had missing effects, or polygons out of place, or z-buffer problems, or generally awful performance. Some just wouldn't even load.

In the end I just gave up on it, sold it, and bought a GeForce 3 Ti200 instead, which worked absolutely flawlessly from day 1.
 
ATI X1650 Pro :mad:that I paid £95 for :eek:

Total garbage when I tried to play up to date games.

Sold it fast for much less money and got myself a X1950 instead! ;)
 
Last edited:
the1gooner said:
Out of the cards that I have owned it has to be the Nvidia FX 5900 (non ultra). Can't believe I swapped a 9800 Pro for one.
Click to expand...

FX5900 was my second choice of worst card ever, it just got pipped to the post by the ATi 8500 LE.
 
Good topic.

I hate to say it, even though they played most of the games on high settings for many years, but the Nvidia GeForce 8800 series have been the most unreliable cards I have ever owned. I have owned 4 cards and all of them have given me problems. First was the GeForce 8800 GTS 320, which fried and then I got a 8800 GTS 640 replacement. The 8800 GTS 640 replacement then eventually started overheating, despite having the case side panel off, and then died. Replaced that with a 8800 GTS 512 which served me quite well, then suffered the same fate as the previous two. My latest 8800 GTX 768, which I bought cheap to replace the 8800 GTS 512, seems to be going the same way as the other 3.
 
robgmun said:
My powerVR, in hindsight is was a bit rubbish and a bitch to work with,

But it was my first ever 3d card and i was overally impressed back then!
Click to expand...

I too got the Power VR as my first 3D card, not knowing a lot about the market and thinking the Power VR would make me go wow..

Sadly, it didn't. the first power VR didn't even filter the textures. When I got a 3Dfx and NEC /Videologic gave me a free update to the Power VR the Power VR 3Dx I'd noticed the 3Dfx was simply amazing and wasn't much bothered with the Power VR anymore. £200 I think that card cost me, total waste of money. Removed the card a few months after getting it and it sat on the side for years, I think I binned it in the end.

Amazing that the Power VR went to power the GPU for the dreamcast...!! lol
 
When sis were making moves on the graphics market with the Xabre series cards I bought an Xabre 600 to test and bench etc. It was appauling, in theory it should have been able to handle Star wars jedi knight without a problem but the thing never managed to play a single game without serious driver issues which rendered it usless.

I bought it for a bit of fun and to play with overclocking, it was supposed to be SIS making a serious move on the market but all it managed to do was show people the reason why sis couldn't make a decent graphics card.
 
ATi rage II without a shadow of a doubt.

6600GT was a bit of a waste too as I quickly replaced it with a 7900GT when I found it wasn't up to much.
 
Riva TNT2 M64.

I got it with a desktop my family bought years ago (can't remember what spec it was other than that) and it played games like crap. I was quite excited at first because I knew the TNT2s were solid cards (especially the TNT2 Ultra!) I later read up it was a crippled version of the TNT2 and the TNT I had before probably offered better performance -_-;;

I later managed to put a Geforce 3 (the special edition version with the ENHANCED Giants: Citezen Kabuto!) in the machine for Christmas, which was pretty much awesome!
 
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