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Graphics cards that made you go "WOW!"

580 classified in sli.

Never have i heard anything so loud in my life,even one was to much to take.

Went from one of them to a windforce 670......silence is golden.
 
Switching to an 8800GT from some crappy AGP 3D Hercules card iirc and it just blew it away for me. At that time, I did a big upgrade that cost me something like £400 for a new mobo/CPU and GPU.... Times have changed a little :p


I still had my 8800 ultra sitting in a box until 2 weeks ago when my friends gfx card died, he is loving it (supposedly better then the one he had before :eek:) lol
 
I think its also a matter of age. Having seen the whole evolution from Hercules, CGA, later VGA (remember Matrox?) 3dfx Voodoo was a real revolution. Everything from Voodoo 1 and then were just huge improvements of the 3d graphics.

For younger people who never met the Hercules or 2D graphics era, the WOW event will be much different.
 
S3 Savage 4, it blew my mind back at the time. Before that I only knew the Creative 3D Blaster although good it got to the point where games were just black screens before I upgraded.

After that the GeForce 4 Ti 4800SE, a beast that just kept on going and going.

Although the Card that really blew my mind was my 8800GTX when I got it. It blew away the previous generation.

The card that did nothing but disappoint me was the 7950GX2, it was great at first ( when it worked). Although the drivers were near useless and it barely ever used the second GPU. NV were quick to drop support as well.
 
3dfx Voodoo 5. It's the graphics card I've had the longest (2.5 years), and iirc, the previous card was a Hercules Prophet. The out of the box difference was night and day. Eventually, a group of titles were released which made it obsolete literally overnight ( for example Unreal 2 / IGI 2).

A little more recently, upgrading from my 4870X2 to a Gigabyte GTX480 SOC. The difference in quality was impressive. The 4870X2 was good, but of course due to the 480 being a single gpu it was more likely to be smoother, which it certainly was. It was an improvement in every respect, even power consumption. :D
 
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The 4k "graphics expansion" cards for the Altair 8800, only 400 solder joints to fit, and providing they didn't short out they would power 4 lCD displays soldered together (no monitors on computers in those days). The WOW would be from your colleagues standing around when you first switched it on and nothing caught fire.
 
My 8800 GTS 512, been cooked in the oven @ 200C for 10mins at least 5 times in the last ~18 months! Recently started giving Stop 0x116 BSOD, might need another roast.
 
The ATI 8500le was my first 'proper' graphics card. Before that I had a TNT2 which was terrible. Counterstrike was so, SO much better after the upgrade, it was a massive leap.

I was also impressed with my current 6850 going from a 8800gt
 
As has been said, 8800GT was the big and major boost that made me 'wow!'. The 460GTX to 670 wasn't as big of a wow compared to when I got my 8800GT. It was still running CoD4 at 90fps+ @1680x1050 when I sold it. I wish we could see the same jump in performance/cost but they just won't when they can rebrand, add 10% onto the clock speeds and charge 20% more.
 
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