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What was the most "successful" Enthusiast Card ever?

Has to be the 8800GT, had a 9800 pro and it was a great card, i paid a premium for it aswell but the 88 was £200, played any game on the market with all the effects max'd at 1680x1050 wich was the market standard res at the time bar crysis though made that game playable with some candy, the card was relevant as a purchase/upgrade for some 3 years, it made high end gaming a mass market thing, the 98 pro was high end with a high end price and the 97 was a real sod to to find as it was.
 
9800 pro>>8800gtx>>5850

The 9800 was just an amazing all-round card. I had the all-in-wonder version which allowed me to play my ps2 games on pc w/o having to unplug anything.

8800gtx was just in a league of its own, for sometime it was unmatched as it just blew the competition with ease. A beast!

5850, the dark horse. Many people opted to go for the more expensive elder brother the 5870 but for me it was just a great purchase for less than £200 on launch. The benchmarks confirmed the minimal difference between the two. Still a cracking card. At 1650 x1080 resolution im not sure you need anything faster than this.
 
I liked the Voodoo 2 and the original Geforce was great but the original Radeon turned up less than a year later.

For me the clear winner is the Radeon 9x00 series, why? because it showed up the same year as the GF4 ti4x00 series and stole the performance crown from Nvidia, the first time ATi had done this in the 3d acceleration era. Nvidia wouldn't win it back for over two years (Geforce 6) as the GF4 series successor the Geforce FX (5) series flagship card the 5950 Ultra wasn't able to topple the Radeon 9800XT from the top of the pile.

The Geforce 8x00 series was great but it wasnt as much of a hammer blow as the Radeon 9x00 and it didnt stay on top as long.

*EDIT*

I should also point out that whereas today visual quality is the same between Nvidia/Ati at least to the naked eye. Back in those days Nvidia sacrificed quality for performance and if you used 3rd party drivers to force the Nvidia hardware to run at the same quality as the ATi hardware then performance suffered. The Radeon 9800XT had better image quality and performance than the comparable Nvidia card and it beat the entire next generation of Nvidia cards too, no other GFX card in history can claim that.

As Tomshardware were a credible source of information back then ill quote them to sum up:

The performance and quality increases offered by the R300 GPU is considered to be one of the greatest in the history of 3D graphics, alongside the achievements GeForce 256 and Voodoo Graphics. Furthermore, NVIDIA's response in the form of the GeForce FX 5800 was both late to market and somewhat unimpressive, especially when pixel shading was used. R300 would become one of the GPUs with the longest useful lifetime in history, allowing playable performance in new games at least 3 years after its launch.
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I've gotta go with 3dfx Voodoo 1 - paired with my Matrox Millennium , hearing that click as it switched over - just magic. OK, it wasn't the best technical solution even at that time, but it had game support and it opened up PC gaming like nothing before.

Close second would be the 9800 Pro (or 9x00 series in general) which was just *the* card to have for such a long time.
 
I think the 9800 Pro should win easily simply becuase it gave the whole industry the kick up the rear it needed.

I think without such a card, we wouldn't be where we are today.

Same kinda thing with Doom/Quake - if it wasn't for them I don't think we'd have Half-Life.
 
8800gtx, my friend had one that I helped install. Was the most impressive bit of pc hardware ever, both performance wise and physically - we could have used it as centre display in the display cabinet.
 
9800 Pro was a great card. I still have mine with an aftermarket heatsink, memory heatsinks, flashed with a Sapphire 9800XT bios I customized to include overclocking (460 on core iirc). Still works great after all the abuse I gave it :p

It really made no sense buying any other card at the time.
 
Arclite said:
9800 pro>>8800gtx>>5850

The 9800 was just an amazing all-round card. I had the all-in-wonder version which allowed me to play my ps2 games on pc w/o having to unplug anything.

8800gtx was just in a league of its own, for sometime it was unmatched as it just blew the competition with ease. A beast!

5850, the dark horse. Many people opted to go for the more expensive elder brother the 5870 but for me it was just a great purchase for less than £200 on launch. The benchmarks confirmed the minimal difference between the two. Still a cracking card. At 1650 x1080 resolution im not sure you need anything faster than this.
Click to expand...

Yeah, the 5850 is a really good bang 4 buck card, it's powerful enough to last a good few years at the rate games are progressing currently. Same could be said for quite a few cards out at the moment though.... the 460's and 470's offer pretty much the same value for money.

My vote goes for the 9700 pro, second choice 8800gt.
 
I think the 8800GTX - I have a pair that I used to use in SLi and my girlfriend still uses one of them today to play Fall Out 3, Sims 3 and WoW. It will still play COD and other recent games on low/medium details too.
 
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