Your favorite graphics card?

[Grim5]

HD5870 - absolute monster in its time, and was dirty cheap too. Unfortunately only 2 years later games needed more than 1gb vram and combined with tessellation killed off this card.

GTX1080ti - absolute monster in its time and is still pretty good today, 3 years after release. Best value purchase ever made, got nearly 70% money back when I sold mine after 1 year.

 

[nashathedog]

My standout card was the Sapphire Fury Tri-x oc edition, Maybe it felt better due to replacing my MSI TFIV 2090x Gaming which was my worst card of all time but the Fury Tri-x was silent under load, cool & easy to live with.

 

[Nevakonaza]

Probably my first dedicated GPU from back in the day,which would be the ATI 9600 Pro (256mb variant) & AGP. (Which i still have fully boxed)

I remember this card practically allowing me to play anything back then,even though the rest of my setup consisted of a Sempron 2800+ and 1.25GB of ram.

Next in line would be the HD6950,Got mine shader unlocked to 6970 successfully,fully stable didn't skip a beat.

 

[bells]

Ati Radeon 9800 as it transformed the games I was playing at the time and the difference was amazing as I had an Mx450 I think

 

[Devrij]

I loved my ati 5850. Cost me 140 quid 2nd hand off here (when it was reasonably new and the top card was the 5970), overclocked like a monster and kept running at that overclock for years. Awesome value for money. That kind of money today wouldn't get you anything as competitive.

 

[Dirk Diggler]

980ti was a good leap in performance

1080ti for performance and longevity. I'm still using it now and will probably skip the 3000 series and hold on to it.

 

[CuriousTomCat]

My favourite graphics card was the ATI Radeon 9500 because the 128 bit memory bus could be unlocked using a modded driver to 256 bit which doubled the memory bandwidth. This meant the 9500 performed the same as the high end 9700.

 

[BigBANGtheory]

1080Ti was imho mired by price inflation and a delayed release but engineering wise was goodun especially on resale as other mentioned.

 

[wookiee87]

for me it would be a couple of cards firstly a gtx 780 ti 3gb, when i first dabbled into watercooling this was my first card that got proper treatment, the core on those cards were absolute monsters, i pushed near 1.1ghz at the time (up from 876mhz) and it was astounding how much quicker it was, shame about the 3gb frame buffer if it was more i'd of kept it longer.

second would be old faithless a gtx 295x2, the one that had 2 pcb's samwitched between the cooler in the middle, again as above got the waterblock installed and allthough not a great overclocker was able to run very cool which allowed extended game sessions (crysis i'm looking at you)

lastly any of the asus matrix series of cards, man they looked the part and from reviews at the time performed really well, yes expensive so dint actually own one but i kept dreaming if only i could've had one

all that aside my current 2080ti makes all of the above look like poop, god how far tech has progressed

 

[V F]

HD5870 - absolute monster in its time, and was dirty cheap too. Unfortunately only 2 years later games needed more than 1gb vram and combined with tessellation killed off this card.

Crysis 2 quickly started killing it. Once the DX11 update hit, half the performance was gone.

GTX1080ti - absolute monster in its time and is still pretty good today, 3 years after release. Best value purchase ever made, got nearly 70% money back when I sold mine after 1 year.

Indeed, Great card still for 3 years later. It's great in The Division 2. Most of the time 3 digits of fps in battles on everything maxed and I still need a better cpu which it's currently on a 3770K at 4.4.

 

[SumpNut]

This thread has brought back some great memories.

For me, it also has to be the ATI 9700 Pro. I had that card in my first year of uni and my housemate had the 9800 Pro, this encouraged me to overclock the snot out of card. It ended up with extra heat sinks stuck all over it and a pull-down resistor on the voltage regulator to bump the vcore up even more!

And yes, I out benchmarked his 9800 Pro

 

[Xelene]

Sapphire x800 GTO2 stands out; https://www.techpowerup.com/articles/overclocking/vidcard/127

 

[Black Dog]

Used to have 2x 3dfx Voodoo Geforce 2's in SLI. My god I was blown away by them at the time. Other than that the ATI 9800 was a beast.

 

[Gerard]

Used to have 2x 3dfx Voodoo Geforce 2's in SLI.

Umm.....

 

[TNA]

Umm.....

Indeed

 

[Phixsator]

My diamond s3 with 16mb. Could finaly play Unreal Tournament with proper fps,
ATI 5850 powered through everything.
MSI 780 lightning.
1080ti after i fitted an aftermarket cooler. Solid performance that still does very well to this day.
Sapphire Vega 64 nitro+, it feels like an enthusiasts card as in if you tinker with it it actually have some solid gains to be had, both in power saving and fps. Surely not for everyone.

 

[Black Dog]

Sorry, meant just 3dfx Voodoo 2's.

 

[pagepack]

For longevity, has to my 290x. Seven years old later this year and still jugging away.

 

[Quartz]

I've just found that Wikipedia has a category for graphics card companies. Over the past 30+ years I've bought cards from at least 13 of them. 14 if you include IBM. I'm getting old.

 

[KentMan]

Like moat others Voodoo 2's was my first foray into real power, playing Unreal MP on Bnet and other places.

6950 Toxic was an awesome card, had it til i replaced it with a 7870.

290 was the card that stuck in my mind tho, had the ref 290 first and it was great but hot and loud so swapped it out for the 290 Tri-X which was superior and finally replaced that with the 290 Toxic. 290 was one of the best cards AMD produced recently.

After the 290 went to a vega 64 but was largely disappointed so swappes it for a 1070 which wasnt a bad card, swapped that for a 1080 and now using a 5700X Red Devil which has been flawless.

But overall my favourite has been the 290