My parents' 2nd PC came with an nvidia Riva 128 (STB velocity before STB was acquired by 3dfx) chipset and Turok looked so shitty and unfiltered that it literally made me cry. Due to that, my parents agreed to add a 3Dfx (later 3dfx, with a lower-case "d") Voodoo2 chipset (Diamond Monster 3D II 8 MB). We had that setup for four years from 5/98 to 3/02.
In 2002, I got a Hypersonic PC of my own with an ATi 9700 Pro. However, I was the only person in the world who hated the 9700 Pro, so I upgraded to a Geforce FX 5900 Ultra the following spring (2003), then in the late spring/early summer 04 I upgraded to a 6800 GT (evga board). By late 06, the HSF was too clogged up with dust, so my parents bought me a Biohazard PC in late 06 with 2 8800 GTXs, and something in that died after I had it for less than 2 months. 8 months, after that, I decided to build my own, which included an 8800GT that died, followed by another 8800 GT that also died with the whole system, presumably since I was an amateur builder at the time and didn't really build it right (it was always pretty unstable). About a year after that, in 9/2009, built a second PC, and it's been workly perfectly fine 1.5 years now, as I learned from my mistakes after fooling with/building my first. I started with a 9800 GTX+ (eVGA, reference) and now have a GTX 460 768MB (Asus, reference).
Since I only have a Socket AM2+ mobo and that's limited to AMD 45nm processors, I'm considering upgrading to SB, but I'm not going to upgrade anything else. I'd be fine if I could find an 8GB kit of really low latency DDR2 RAM and if AMD had a 32nm Phenom II X4 (3.2 GHz cores) with ~3 GHz L3 cache that fit into an AM2+ mobo, but they don't, so I'm thinking about upgrading to SB.