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Your favourite gpu, ever? Blast from the past..

Duke said:
Relevant :)
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Very relevant to me too, the first 3DFX card purchase for me blew me away on how good it made Quake look. I have many happy memories of lugging my pc to a mates house and a crowd of us spending most of the day trying to get the network to work for everyone, but when it did work it was great.

The 8800GTX was also a superb card, but the Orchid Righteous was pretty special as it was the first and awesome in its day.
 
Voodoo like most people was amazing, first time i saw one in use was wow, think it was on incoming. Crap game great graphics.

Then probably ATI Readon 8500, not the best card but probably that last top end card for under £200 :(
 
My best ever overclocking card was a vanilla 7850 which could bench at 1400MHz (see sticky within this forum). However, I have to rate my 8800 GTX above this for it's awesome performance and longevity. It simply destroyed everything else within it's era, and could still play newly released games 4-5 years later.

I rate my cards as follows.
1). 8800 GTX (it was a monster)
2). 9700 Pro (really put ATI on the map)
3). 7850 (nothing overclocks better)
4). 5850 (great performance/price ratio)
5). TI4200 (super budget performer)
 
Guillemot International 3Dfx Voodoo 1 (4MB). Got it for Xmas from Electronics Boutique for £99.99, I think I was 12 at the time. We couldn't get it to work on Xmas day, and I was absolutely gutted. I managed to find a fix described in the technical section of a back issue of PC Format or something and was able to get it working by adding something to POST with a floppy disk. Me and my dad couldn't believe it worked. I didn't talk to anyone all Xmas after that.

It was amazing going from plain old VGA to 3Dfx. I remember trying it out on the first Tomb Raider and being amazed, then installing every demo I could get my hands on, like Turok, Wipeout, POD etc. Quake 2 was just unbelievable. Coloured lighting!

Sadly it was let down by the terrible 686 cyrix processor we had though which just couldn't handle floating point calculations, so frame rates were terrible on a lot of games, but I didn't seem to care back then.

Then I had a crap Emachines 900Mhz Celeron at uni with onboard Intel graphics, Played MaAx Payne well enough though.

I "upgraded" it to a Radeon 7000 64MB for about £40 so I could play Ghost Recon, which was probably the most useless graphics card I've ever had.

Then I got a 6800 vanilla around the time of HL2/Doom3/BF3 and that was AMAZING. Probably the biggest jump in graphics fidelity of the last 10 years.

Radeon x1950 Pro - OK, not great, but let me play Oblivion

8800GT - pretty good, still couldnt run Crysis properly though. BF2 was great though

Radeon 5850 - Awesome, still couldnt run Crysis properly though...

HIS IceQ x2 Radeon 7970 - Unbelievable - destroys all games, but there just isnt anything that interesting out at the moment that will stretch it.
 
Probably be a tie between my old trusty 8800GTX (which is still going strong in my friends machine after almost 6 years), and my 5970 which I don't feel the need to upgrade yet as it deals with 99% of games on high/ultra. Wish it had more VRAM though.
 
8800GT which last 2 years before i knackered it replacing the heatsink, but my current GTX275 is still going well, £175 well spent 3 or 4 years ago.
 
Original 3DFX card, think mine was a Maxi Gamer.

Voodoo 2 SLI, Voodoo 3 and the original Geforce were all momentous too in the days of going to LAN party's and fellow nerds gathering around to watch a GFX benchmark :D
 
Geforce 3 for me.

It cost me about a month's wages at the time :p, and it was about 6x the speed of the card that it replaced


8800GT is a good shout though, that card had some life in it! Nvidia keep releasing driver updates for it, my brother is using my old one.
 
GTX 285, Order Date: 3 Apr, 09, 10:27 am

Lasted me until a couple of months ago when I bought a couple of GTX 680s.

Ran everything I could throw at it - definitely my favourite card - the 680s are running like champs as well. I predict I'll have those for at least as long as I kept the 285.
 
Hard one to decide. Have the 7850 now which is good. Have had various cards and the ones that stand out are 3DFX Voodoo 4MB, ATI 7000 32MB, ATI 9600XT 128MB or the pair of ATI 3870 512MB. I think I would go for the 9600XT. That card ran everything at the time and lasted me years. I know which card I wouldn't say was my favourite, that was the NVidia FX5200 128MB.
 
ibpalle said:
GTX 285, Order Date: 3 Apr, 09, 10:27 am

Lasted me until a couple of months ago when I bought a couple of GTX 680s.

Ran everything I could throw at it - definitely my favourite card - the 680s are running like champs as well. I predict I'll have those for at least as long as I kept the 285.
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I havea 285 atm it is indeed a decent card, shame no dx 11 however.

Also the vram is too low for some games now, shogun 2 is a leech with vram!
 
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