• Competitor rules

    Please remember that any mention of competitors, hinting at competitors or offering to provide details of competitors will result in an account suspension. The full rules can be found under the 'Terms and Rules' link in the bottom right corner of your screen. Just don't mention competitors in any way, shape or form and you'll be OK.

Graphics cards that made you go "WOW!"

MrMarvelous said:
Just had a Google of it as i've never heard of it, looks like a right beast! The cooler on the 8800 in this video is adorable.

Click to expand...

The name rings a bell for some reason, there was an ultra that never came into stock on the ocuk website despite being listed it never had any stock numbers on it, I'm near sure that watercooled variation of that card was it.

The old stealth bomber looking heatsink fan as people used to call it, nice looking card for the time.
 
Titan.

Nothing else I have owned has come anywhere near it (nor the price).

My main issue with Nvidia and the Titan is that they discontinued it in favour of the Black, which offered relatively little performance gain. Now I can't easily find another for SLI (already had one "bay" offer recovered by Paypal as it was a scam). Thanks. It's almost enough to make me go with the red team for the next series; but I'm not sure I can return to putting up with poor drivers again.

Other card of note, I think it was the Geforce 3 (4?)...or whatever the card was resulting from the merger of 3dfx and nvidia. I did not have it, but my flatmate did; and it was crazy good.

First main card - Voodoo 2....many happy memories.
 
First geforce 256 pro.

They sent me the 16mb by mistake, when the 32mb pro finaly came... q3 realy did Fly on a smooth frame rate all up.

Blew the voodoo away.. biggest jump for me.
 
Ayahuasca said:
and people moan about GPU prices now, 9800pro was around £500 on release iirc. Same with some of nvidia cards back then if not more.
Click to expand...
People moan about the prices "now" because the performance increase is nowhere as much as the good old days :rolleyes:

If there's a modern day equivalent of 9800Pro, 8800GTX/Ultra which will offer over 80-100% performance increase over previous gen top end card, I doubt there would be anywhere as much people moaning about the price...even I would be happily drop £500-£600+ for one...
 
Last edited:
When I went from GeForce 3 Ti200 64MB to Radeon 9500Pro 128MB in january 2003... that made me wow...

Else I haven't had any real wow moments. I have had 128 graphics card in the last 15-17years, so my upgrade path hasn't been made in performance jumps. I have a complete list of every name and card model I had ... and I have cards that were more special to me than others. E.g my Creative 3D Blaster Riva TNT2 Ultra Gamer 32MB card was the card that made me able to play all games in 32bit with great FPS and it also paved way for gaming in the back then insane resolution of 1280x1024 in MS Combat Flight Simulator.
 
Marine-RX179 said:
The exact very first graphic card I owned. Ah memories...:p
Click to expand...

Then I guess you'll enjoy some of these pictures (I still have them);)

HPIM2708.jpg

HPIM2709.jpg


HPIM0750.jpg

HPIM0751.jpg


HPIM0276-1.jpg

HPIM0277-1.jpg


HPIM0278-1.jpg

HPIM0279-1.jpg
 
The ATI 6850 for me, it was the first graphics card I owned and I bought it for roughly £70 new. Coming from using Laptop graphics and consoles it really made me go wow and still does whenever I feel like plugging it in, when it ran Battlefield 3 smoothlessly at high settings I just grinned, overclocked like a beast as well :)
 
GTX 780 reference. I knew it would perform well and the 3GB of vram would help in some games. I also knew that the cooler looked awesome. So none of that impressed him much.

However I didn't know the lighting on the side could be controlled and I was completely blown away when I set it to audio flashing and the LED's brightness scaled with the volume of whatever was playing. It is so awesome to see your card light up everytime you shoot your gun or to see it "dance" to whatever music you might be playing.
 
Matrox mystique, you never forget your first one. I can still remember tomb raider with it.
 
8800GTX - Probably one of the best cards I had purchased

5900ULTRA - WOW because it was so crap for what I paid.
5200FX - Again utter utter crap, it was an impulse buy.
X850XTPE - Wasn't as good as I was expecting...

I've had some decent cards over time too, just none that made me go WOW apart from the 8800.
 
RIVA TNT 1
Ati Radeon 9600Pro
8600GT
8800 gts 512Mb
470 GTX MSI Twinfrozr

When i changed to the radeon 9600 i was left with the mouth open!
Huge dissapointment with the 8600Gt for that price i was expecting a lot more.
Then i found a 8800 gts 512mb in a really good price (a 3rd of the price, stock sale) and that blew me away. The change was amazing.
The change between 8800 and 470 was wow as well and a lot more cool because of the fans compared to the 8800 which had the nvidia one. I finally could play 1080p maxed out.
Now lets see some Maxwell please!!
 
3DFX Voodoo 1 for me, i saw Quake running on it at a mates and bought one the following day. Nothing else has come close (except maybe seeing F-Zero on the SNES for the first time...!)
 
3DFX Voodoo for me too. I had an Orchid Righteous 3D. What a card. I can still remember the "click" sound when 3D mode was enabled. Coupled with my Pentium 233MMX it was a Quake beast.
Nothing since then has given me the same amount of WOW!
I suppose the next biggest WOW for me was the nVidia Riva TNT2 Ultra I had after I went through the obligatory Voodoo 2 SLI setup.
After that, just speed bumps to be honest.
 
So of the ones that made me go WOW for cause they were so bad.

I remember on the family PC we had a Matrox board that was PowerVR (think it was the M3D) board that was incompatible with the original Matrox Mystique so that didn't work out too well when I found that out.

Then I went through 3 of them myself in my machine cause they keeping dying from overheating, they had no heat sink at all on them.

Then a Guillemot Maxi Gamer Phoenix graphics card - Voodoo Banshee - 16 MB which was crap. Was sold as the benefits of combined 2D and 3D on one board but a lot of games wouldn't detect that it was 3d capable as they were always looking for another card in the system. (Original GTA suffered from that if I remember correctly)

In terms of good ones, as some others have said the original GeForce card, it had a couple of versions, one had SDR and one DDR, so glad I paid extra for the DDR version, lasted me longer than the SDR card would have.

GeForce 3 Ti 500, first time I dropped serious money on a gfx card. It was also so funny to see lots of people that got the GeForce 4 cards that didn't perform as well cause they were missing Hardware Transform and Lighting which the 3 Ti 500 had.

Those were the days.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom