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

I quite disliked my 7800GT, changed it for a 8800GT as soon as they came out, still using it today :D Plays everything on high just fine.
 
wow thankfully I skipped the whole TNT M64 issue. I got a TNT 2 Ultra (think it was a 64MB Card) and it was actually fairly decent..

Replaced it with a 9700 pro when I built a whole new gaming rig. 9700 Pro totally destroyed anything I'd had before this...
 
LizardKing said:
Strange, the 8500LE was my first Ati card and i've never had Nvidia since. Had it flashed to 8500pro for 90% of its life to. I was going to suggest it in the best card thread due to the great value it offered at the time and was at the turning point in ATi drivers.
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It took months for the 8500 drivers to become acceptable (not good, just acceptable).

The value for money was great, especially as you could turn the 8500LE into an 8500 with a 25MHz bump on the core, and a 50MHz bump on the memory, and save yourself £100.

But the drivers were still terrible at the 8500 launch, it took almost until the 9XXX series before they became acceptable, and by then the Ti4200 was destroying the 8500's in everything.
 
Nvidia 6800GT.

The Image Quality of the cards sucked compared to ATI's 98xx range of cards.

Dull, lifeless colours and appalling Anti Aliasing and Ansitropic filtering which at the time were having to use all sorts of 'cheats' to get acceptable performance.
 
Speed said:
Although a good card in terms of performance I had no end of problems with a 9700Pro. Gave up in the end, think it must have been some sort of compatiablity issue with a motherboard chipset or just bad luck.

Funny thing is I sold it 6 months later and it worked perfectly for the buyer.
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There were known issues with the VIA KT333 chipset, like the one found on my Asus A7V333R motherboard. I swapped every component in my machine to find this out. About a year down the line this became common knowledge :)
 
ATI Rage Fury MAXX for me.
My first dual GPU card and it was rubbish.
I don't think dual GPU had been done before and they didn't really know how to make it work. Everything just detected it as an ATI Rage Fury card.

Although to be fair that was a while back and I didn't use the internet (either at all or as much as I do these days) so I didn't really know how other people were getting on with it or any of the other cards I had.

My Voodoo Banshee card was pretty disappointing too. thjink that was the card I had before the Rage Fury MAXX.
 
Hercules graphics card, it could output two shades of monochrome only.

This was back in day when a 640x480 vga card cost £1000 that's £2000 in today's money.
 
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Probably a geforce 5200. My first graphics card bought on its own. Didn't really research things and just assumed more memory and bigger number than my previous card then it must be better. While it was quicker than my mx440 I was slightly underwhelmed by it. Live and learn.
 
S3 Trio 64 1MB.

It was integrated onto the motherboard, and since there was no way of disabling it I was stuck without a decent video card for too long.
Not even being able to use a PCI Banshee card was pretty annoying!
 
I also had an ATI 8500 le 64mb card, which ran great for me. I remember having just sold my Voodoo 5 at the time (great card in my experience), and was quite impressed with the smoother, higher frame rates in Morrowind. During those early days I upgraded my graphics quite a bit more frequently than I do nowadays and sold it on to a mate who loved it; that is until one day when a mutual friend accidentally dropped a coin...which landed on the card...pop! That was the end of that. :D

As for the worst card, trying to rack my brains but it's a close call between the Geforce 2mx Tornado 32mb and a 64mb Hercules Prophet. I think it was a driver issue, or at least partly. (I'll add that I don't remember being that impressed by the X800 pro vivo 256mb although it was relatively speaking way better than the above mentioned cards.)
 
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nvidias first card, the NV1 3d Edge...£400 for 2mb and they never got around to releasing fully working drivers; i avoided nvidia for years after that.
 
I didn't know what I was doing!

I was using the motherboard's built in S3 chip and was having real problems getting videos to run smoothly at full screen (all 19inches of it!). So I went to PC World to look for a 6000 series GeForce because the magazine said they're good. I ended up paying £70 for a 6200..... It was on a par with the S3 integrated chip!! It came with Far Cry and couldn't play it above Low settings - what were they thinking!

I soon changed that for a £99 6600GT which I thought was very impressive until a friend got me to try a WMVHD file and it couldn't play it smoothly. Overall, wasn't very impressed by nVidia's 6000 series!
 
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