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Your graphic card mistakes..
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Associate
- Joined
- 9 Dec 2015
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- 809
7950 gx2 and 290 reference (owned that for a day then sold it)
Soldato
Everything with a reference cooler I purchased over the years.
I either fitted a 3rd party cooling solution and spent more that I would have waiting for a non-reference card to be released or punted the offending item at a loss to fund a non-reference card.
I either fitted a 3rd party cooling solution and spent more that I would have waiting for a non-reference card to be released or punted the offending item at a loss to fund a non-reference card.
Soldato
^This. XFX 6870 blower, card itself was ace but my god i swore id never have a blower again, ive never heard such noise and ive had Delta fans in the past 
The thing was hitting 90c in games so stuck an Accelero cooler on it to save my sanity.
The thing was hitting 90c in games so stuck an Accelero cooler on it to save my sanity.
Was it the 5800 with the leaf blower cooler? That thing was genuinely funny, pretty much a rushed out response to the 9700/9800 series from ATI.
The 59X0 cards weren't quite as bad.
Associate
The real question here is .. what the hell is a PUB 
Don't recall off the top of my head any real regrets - the only card I wasn't particularly enthusiastic about was the 5900XT but it overclocked like a beast which made up for some of the downsides of the 5000 series and by the time the decreased image quality with newer DX9 shaders started to become more apparent there were newer cards out anyhow and the 6000 series was a much better product.
Can't say I regretted my purchase of one of those - also bought the spacer kit so I could cool it better and it overclocked pretty well. The odd game I only got to take advantage of SLI AA instead of getting a performance boost directly from the second card but very few games I didn't get running decently with it.
Can't say I regretted my purchase of one of those - also bought the spacer kit so I could cool it better and it overclocked pretty well. The odd game I only got to take advantage of SLI AA instead of getting a performance boost directly from the second card but very few games I didn't get running decently with it.
Associate
ATI 3870, was ditched fairly quickly for a 4850, which was a much better card.
ATi X800 Pro Vivo, though I don't think that was the problem, most likely being held back by the CPU. It just seemed rather lackluster in performance over the previous card (9800se) vs what I was expecting. Perhaps my expectations were unrealistic.
I can still remember when we used to have these placed called a pubThe real question here is .. what the hell is a PUB
But I don't think there anymore left these days that still open
Soldato
I bought myself the 3870x2 pretty much when it released and I found it a pretty good card, not that many games made use of the Xfire capabilities but still good.
I had myself a Geforce 5800 which I think was an engineering sample as it had a massive blower cooler on it that I think was black, not like the copper jobbies I see pictures of in memes. The thing could clock like crazy, almost double the memory speed and the GPU clocks went pretty high too. Not the most sensible purchase and I didn't have it long before getting myself a 9800SE softmodded to a 9800pro.
Yeah I had a 5900XT that did ~50% core and memory overclocks with a modified firmware and uprated cooling - which made it almost not totally embarrassed by the 9000 series cards until games came along that started actually using DX9 shaders, etc. where the image quality difference started to show up. Fortunately the 6000 series came along at that point.
Associate
The x2 cards seemed to work pretty well back then, they actually had both GPUs on the same board if I recall correctly. I just found the 3870 on its own a bit underwhelming, whereas the 4850 did exactly what I wanted.
My mate had a 9800SE, but that wouldn't unlock, gave checkerboard artifacts. I had a proper 9800 pro, what a great card that was, definitely not a mistake that one.
Don
9800SE bought based on the unlocking hype but it was the one with the wrong layout so couldn't be unlocked
The 9800se I had was modded to have the extra 'pipeline'? unlocked as well as additional fans for cooling. I don't know how close it was to a stock 9800 Pro but I do remember running Far Cry quite comfortably with most if not all settings turned up.
There was a window between the move from more primitive graphics techniques towards full unified shader/compute features where multi GPU generally worked pretty well - especially if you were handy with the profile tweaking tools and had half an idea how to optimise it yourself. The 7950GX2 also used a bridge chip so that more data was shuttled core to core rather than via the PCI-e bus and/or CPU which gave a small improvement (mostly ~5% but could be 10-15% in some cases) over multiple cards in different PCI-e slots.
Associate
Nice explanation Rroff, cheers for that. It certainly seemed to handle multi GPU better than the PCI-E bus does. I remember that 7950GX2 too, that was a much sought after card at the time.
I remember when I had a GeForce 2 GTS 32mb card, that wasn't a mistake but my mate made one when he got himself a Geforce 2 MX card thinking it was similar speed..
The GF2 MX cards were... interesting... ranging from some cards made by IIRC Elsa Gladiac which weren't actually bad at all and could be overclocked to match non-MX cards through to some with really really slow VRAM which were utterly hateful. I remember someone getting a Dell or something build with a MX400 and really happy about it until they tried gaming and it was like 10x slower than a GeForce 2 GTS.
Soldato
I don't think I've ever regretted a GPU purchase. I generally buy on lots of research and reviews.