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

nitram100 said:
Elsa Gladiac PCI..(I know, PCI wtf lol), it was the first card I bought that allowed me to get 60fps in Quake 3. I had a poo computer that only had a PCI slot, so this card was a god send.
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Oh wow, forgot about my Elsa Gladiac 920. Cracking card that was. My first card was a 3DFX voodoo banchee.
 
Fond memories of

1. Kryo2 that i bought in Hong Kong in 1998. Spent days scouring all the shops trying to get the best price possible. Made my pc feel like some kind of supercomputer when i first ran quake 2. though a 3D accelerator.

2. The original Geforce FX that everyone slated. I went to the Nvidia press launch (2 day event) and we all got one for free ..... months after the event, due to all the problems they had with it. Getting a reference card direct from them felt pretty special.
 
*8800GTX EASY. No graphics card before or since has claimed such longevity.
*9700Pro was probably my next favorite.
*I also have fond memories of my TI4200 AND HD4850, although this is mostly because they offered 90% of top dog performance for bargain prices.
*The 7850 seems the best of a poor bunch of current gen cards. Neither the HD7xxx or GTX6xx series impress me too much. They are not "next gen tech" in the way that the HD9700's and GTX8800's were.
 
When i've upgraded my cards i've never really noticed much of an improvement, maybe because it just played the same games as before and they played fine on the previous card. yeah you got higher fps but who really cared if your games were playing at an acceptable framerate anyway?

I was a benchmark manic for a few years though, I had loads of fun with my Geforce 4400Ti paired with an NF7-S board and a mobile 2500+ CPU.

The Geforce 7900GT was loads of fun as well due to the easy voltage mod you could perform and over clock past GTX levels. I bought another and was a happy bunny for ages using an A64 3700+ then one of those 4000+ CPUs that did 3GHZ


The 8800 Ultra SLI was fun as well but overclocking was poor i seem to remember. The longevity of the series was only due to the fact that they hadn't updated the range in ages not because it was such a good card though lol.
 
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mike712 said:
My first serious gaming rig was an AMD 3200 Barton core with this beast:

***


The Leadtek Winfast 4800Ti.

If I remember correctly it was by far the most powerful graphics card on the market by a considerable margin, I remember wowing my friends by running both Unreal Tournament 2003 and 2004 side by side on max settings with max bots in spectator mode. It held it's own until shader model 3 started being used in DX9c. All that for a mere £128.
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Damn, that brings back memories. Though I never had the card but did see that cool heatsink everywhere on all the review sites. Looked the bees knees back then.

Leadtek really did make some interesting beasty heatsinks back then for AGP cards.

WinFast A280 TD powered by NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4800 SE GPU, onboard 128MB DDR memory, bundled WinFastDVD, WinFox II , Cult 3d , Coloreal Embedded , Coloreal Visual , Coloreal Bright , Aquanox¡BMaster Rallye , Tom Clancy's RainBow six - Rogue Spear and 6 value demo game.

First Industry AGP 8X Board

WinFast A280 TD series powered by NVIDIA's GeForce4 Ti 4800 SE GPU, are the first ones to support latest AGP 8X(V3.0) technology in a graphics card. AGP 8X(V3.0) is the next generation of VGA interface with its AGP
533MHz bus, the transfer rate speeds up to 2.1GB/sec to enhance graphics performance.

The new bandwidth of AGP 8X is at least twice as fast when compared to the present industry standards. WinFast A280 TD series allows end user to experience the most realistic, life-like image ever experienced on a desktop PC.

WinFast A280 TD series delivers the world fastest and highest quality for DirectXR and OpenGLR Application Program Interface(API) support, and also supports NVIDIA Shading technology to deliver real-time, photo-realistic graphics.

5926eb812a26413c95d3967.jpg
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KompuKare said:
But in general I would say cost cutting has gotten worse. High power means amongst other things good quality capacitor etc., and in so much electronics capacitor plague is still with us - hence the feature list on good of cards and motherboards about solid and/or Japanese capacitors.
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HaloUK said:
Oh wow, forgot about my Elsa Gladiac 920. Cracking card that was.
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Yeah, it was indeed. Though I always admired the Hercules 3D Prophet III.

hercs.jpg

herculesgf3.jpg
 
Defy Belief said:
Its quite incredible how many really old cards that have been abused and clocked as far as possible and still work, see so many dead gpus right now. Anyone think that the quality has dropped? Has cost overrided quality.
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I honestly think the demand to push the silicon harder is to blame, not the quality. Need more grunt in such a small package.
 
I liked my 4670 with Zalman cooler, was a bargain and silent. My Powercolour X800 Pro 256mb cost me a small fortune and was my first, you never forget your first. :p
 
I remember having an 8MB ATI Rage Pro, used to play podracer and half life back in the day, was a definite improvement over the 2MB 2D card before it. Then I got a 32MB rage 128 pro and Q3A was giving me ridiculous FPS along with my K6-2 500!
 
I have had some great cards from many years ago. I remember a 9800Pro was a big card for me around call of duty 1 time. I also owned a Leadtek card and dont have a clue what it was but it looked so good. it was like the 1 posted above but it was housed fully in the aluminium shell. Looks like a mini 6990 :P
 
Not my favourite in terms of performance/lifespan (that would be Asus 8800GTX) nor my favourite for sheer "WTF-ness" (that would be a Leadtek 5950 GTX - dustbuster :D), but the one I enjoyed most was my Orchid Righteous 3D.
I received that for my 15 birthday, but before I officially did, I had cut the sellophane wit ha craft knife, replaced the card inside the box with a book of equal weight and re-taped the box up. The card was installed for a month before I actually was 'given' it MWAHAHAHA!!
 
Dual Voodoo IIs
those where the days!

tbh I think I was always most happy with 3Dfx cards, having Glide as an option made life so much better!
 
mike712 said:
The next card I had that really sticks in my memory(probably because of the world of hurt it put on my bank balance) was the ASUS Extreme N7800 Dual, limited to 2000 ever made, weighing the best part of a kilo and costing the best part of £1000(back in 2006!), it was the first SLI card on a single PCB in existence, just dug mine out of storage for a photo opp:
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Ahem,

http://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/gigabyte_3d1_(dual_gpu_6600gt),2.html

Unlikely to be the first (depends how far back we are looking) but certainly earlier than the dual 7800.
 
I remember buying 2 x 7800GTX XXX Edition cards when they first came out. Bought them from OCUK..cost me an absolute fortune.
SLI was in its ealry days then and the micro stutter was terrible... I still have one of them in an old PC. I replced them with a 8800GT which was outstanding.
 
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