Unobtainium?

[lavaheadache]

For years I have been looking but haven't even found one for sale never mind at a price I would pay.

You would think it was a legend in it's day, but you would be wrong. By looking at it you would have thought.... My word that thing must be Schweeeet! ... but you would be left sour.

Geforce fx 5800 Ultra. Where are you? It has almost turned into a game just to game on one.

Seriously, I think these cards must have been tossed in the trash the day after they were bought.

Has anyone seen one recently?

FOUND:

Gorgeous card!






Card in bound. Thanks Fred!!!!!





Brethren





----Edit----

So Today 3/3/14 I met locally with somebody to pick up a like new in box 9800 XT for cheap. When I opened the box this is what I found



That's a developers sample 5900 Ultra in mint condition. The person I bought the card off of was the wife of an ex-video game developer who had the "9800 XT" because it was a launch Half Life 2 product. Wonder what happened here lol. Anyway all is good. I needed a box for my 9800 XT. Another funny thing is that all the accessories are sealed even the unscratched HL2 redemption code.

Here is the dev board next to one of my retail cards to show the difference.

 

[Puffnstuff]

Well I don't have one of those but I do have a radeon all in wonder 9800 pro and a fx5200 boxed up and for sale on craigs list.

 

[Rvenger]

For years I have been looking but haven't even found one for sale never mind at a price I would pay.

You would think it was a legend in it's day, but you would be wrong. By looking at it you would have thought.... My word that thing must be Schweeeet! ... but you would be left sour.

Geforce fx 5800 Ultra. Where are you? It has almost turned into a game just to game on one.

Seriously, I think these cards must have been tossed in the trash the day after they were bought.

Has anyone seen one recently?

I have never owned a 5800 Ultra but I did have a 5900 Ultra "Nbox" edition. I traded it for the Chaintech Gold edition Ti4200 and Radeon 9600XT. I still have the Chaintech Ti4200.

 

[thetuna]

No 5800 Ultra here; but I do have a 10-year-old Dell that's still running with a 5800!
One of the greatest achievements of my childhood was convincing my parents that they needed a 5800 in the new family computer

 

[lavaheadache]

I have a 5950u and 5900u. Just not that stinking elusive 5800u

 

[RussianSensation]

You would think arguably the worst videocard ever made would be easy to find but because of how bad it was, it is probably sitting in some box under 10 years of dust in someone's garage/basement. Maybe Keysplayer can tap into his NV network and find out if anyone is willing to sell one to you.

 

[lavaheadache]

You would think arguably the worst videocard ever made would be easy to find but because of how bad it was, it is probably sitting in some box under 10 years of dust in someone's garage/basement. Maybe Keysplayer can tap into his NV network and find out if anyone is willing to sell one to you.

no kidding. I really don't think anyone held on to them. Seriously, for atleast 4 years I haven't even seen one pop upfor sale anywhere

 

[Wild Thing]

You would think arguably the worst videocard ever made would be easy to find but because of how bad it was, it is probably sitting in some box under 10 years of dust in someone's garage/basement. Maybe Keysplayer can tap into his NV network and find out if anyone is willing to sell one to you.

Even the Edsel has a devoted fanclub...a 5800 will turn up somewhere.

 

[digitaldurandal]

For years I have been looking but haven't even found one for sale never mind at a price I would pay.

You would think it was a legend in it's day, but you would be wrong. By looking at it you would have thought.... My word that thing must be Schweeeet! ... but you would be left sour.

Geforce fx 5800 Ultra. Where are you? It has almost turned into a game just to game on one.

Seriously, I think these cards must have been tossed in the trash the day after they were bought.

Has anyone seen one recently?

I had one up until 2012 however it had a bad memory chip, I probably killed it prematurely by flashing it to a 5850 Ultra. Ended up tossing it and giving away two 9800 GX2's to someone.

Sorry

EDIT: mine may have been a 5900 maybe.

 

[Stuka87]

I had a 5700 Ultra, was a pretty good card as far as FX series cards go (Which as a whole sucked). I may still have it around here some place. Cant recall really.

 

[Mondozei]

So can anyone tell the rest of us why that card was so horrible as to be called the worst ever? I'm guessing it is the usual stuff(high energy consumption, loud, bad performance etc), but what separates it to such an extent as to be in a class of its own?

 

[YBS1]

So can anyone tell the rest of us why that card was so horrible as to be called the worst ever? I'm guessing it is the usual stuff(high energy consumption, loud, bad performance etc), but what separates it to such an extent as to be in a class of its own?

Well, usually when people talk of a card being "bad", it's usually meant by one or two metrics as compared to the competition. Maybe it's louder, slightly slower, uses more power, or costs more, etc. Rare is it that a card is able to pull off a total loss in all categories. That's pretty much what happened to the 5800 Ultra against the 9700 Pro. It arrived late only to be beaten by the 9700 Pro in pretty much ever metric, some of them badly.

 

[Z15CAM]

Lets get to the CORE of this " Unobtainium". You want me to res-eruct my 138Mhz VIA Chipset ASUS P3V4X Slot 1 Mainboard running WinSE with a Taulatin Vidded Converter Card at 1.8GHz's and AGP ATi 2600XT - Is there something I'm missing?

The PC's name was HOTROD and I still have her.

Eat your heart out Intel 440BX Abit Lovers

Truly a Classic build among all Enthusiasts - Them were the days.

 

[Bateluer]

So can anyone tell the rest of us why that card was so horrible as to be called the worst ever? I'm guessing it is the usual stuff(high energy consumption, loud, bad performance etc), but what separates it to such an extent as to be in a class of its own?

In a nutshell: It performed worse than ATI's 9700 Pro, cost more than the 9700 Pro, was louder than the 9700 Pro, consumed more power than the 9700 Pro, lacked full DirectX 9 support due to a spat with Microsoft, and Nvidia fouled it up more by releasing drivers that downgraded IQ by using an Nvidia proprietary DX spinoff API. Not exactly the company's finest hour.

 

[Z15CAM]

If the ATi 9800SE had Hynix Ram all you had to do was flash the bios with a 9800XT firmware and hence a 128Mb XT operated at the same clocking of the 256Mb 9800 XT.

Back in them days I would flash ATi cards to the next level.

I'm sorry that ATi sold out to AMD because all nVidia had to offer, at the time, was their Riva TNT 24-Bit colour that could not match ATi's 32-Bit colour and speed let a lone ATi's Mach 64 or Mavol's 32 Bit Color Matrix card.

The ATi Rage 128 Fury definitely proved to be the basics of what we see on our monitor today and nVidia had to catch up.

This post is not meant to be fighting words but that was the case with "Unobtainium" Graphic Cards of the time by my experience.

Right now I run 2 AMD reference R9 290X's in cross fire under XSPC water blocks onto a QNIX 2560x1400 Samsung PLS Display - Times have changed,

 

[RussianSensation]

So can anyone tell the rest of us why that card was so horrible as to be called the worst ever? I'm guessing it is the usual stuff(high energy consumption, loud, bad performance etc), but what separates it to such an extent as to be in a class of its own?

NV showed up late to the first DX9 generation with horrendous DX9 performance, hot, higher power use, loud card, with inferior IQ to boot. When a competitor's $100 videocard is within 4% of an NV $500 flagship in a modern well-optimized game of that time, you have the recipe for NV's worst GPU generation of all time:

"In our first test, we see that ATI holds an incredible lead over NVIDIA, with the Radeon 9800 Pro outscoring the GeForce FX 5900 Ultra by almost 70%. The Radeon 9600 Pro manages to come within 4% of NVIDIA's flagship, not bad for a ~$100 card."
http://www.anandtech.com/show/1144/8

FX5000 series suffered from poor on angle AF (although AMD's off-angle AF was horrible too), but on top of it it had horrendous MIP-map transitions and resorted to a combination of tri-linear and bi-linear texture filturing. FX5000 regressed in IQ over GeForce 4.

"So, we see that GeForce FX doesn’t bring any positive innovations over GeForce4 as far as anisotropic filtering quality is concerned. On the contrary, by introducing the mixture of tri-linear and bi-linear filtering instead of true tri-linear filtering they tend to worsen the image quality quite tangibly."
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/graphics/display/geforce-fx_12.html

NV also had worse AA to boot:
"The good old 2x and 4x of NVIDIA GeForce FX provide the same quality of “jaggies” smoothing as 2x and 4x of ATI RADEON 9700 PRO, but the advantage of the rotated grid from ATI is clearly seen at edges angled closer to absolute horizontals and verticals."
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/graphics/display/geforce-fx_15.html

We already know that FX5000 was worthless for next gen DX9 games but what about DX8/8.1 games?

"It looks as if the hardest test for GeForce FX 5800 Ultra in Unreal Tournament was the immense amount of textures. You can see how low the performance drops in the “Application” mode that uses true tri-linear filtering and highest LOD." If you wanted half decent IQ, with the Application mode, FX5800Ultra's performance dropped dramatically against 9700 Pro "Quality mode"

The performance hit with decent IQ on FX5000 was so large that it made running running Application mode unusable, which means you had to sacrifice IQ for performance while with an ATI 9000 series you didn't have to make those trade-offs. The only safe heaven for FX5000 series were a handful of OpenGL titles and flight sims. If you primarily played those games 95% of the time, then I guess it was an OK card.

The icing on the rotten cake was the Dustbuster sound that FX5800 Ultra produced.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qspdnAYiiug

 

[Grooveriding]

Was EVGA around when this card came out ? If so I would try contacting them if you have a hefty base of cards registered with them. They might hook you up if they have one laying around still.

 

[RussianSensation]

nVidia CEO: GeForce FX GPU almost "killed" the company

"It was one ugly GPU as nVidia's CEO referred to as a GPU that only a "mother could love" as to how ugly this GPU was." "They spent to the tune of $400 million making the GPU and it was investment that made nVidia almost go bankrupt due to the poor sales that it garnered because it was getting smacked around by the ATI 9700 Pro and later the 9800 Pro."
http://www.gamespot.com/forums/pc-m...rce-fx-gpu-almost-killed-the-compan-30997114/

What makes 5800 Ultra special in a way is that it's the lowest point in NV's modern history. Ironically the failure of FX5800Ultra made 9700Pro one of the most legendary videocards, forever cementing itself in the pantheon of greatness along with 8800 Ultra. Everything we see today in Kepler and Maxwell doesn't just trace back to correct the mistakes of Fermi but all the way back to 5800 Ultra. Thankfully 6800 series was excellent. I guess one can pick up an FX5200 as arguably even worse since at least with the 5800 Ultra you could install an after-market cooler and make it bearable.

 

[BFG10K]

This card sure brings back memories of this forum. In particular there was a certain individual that used to parade around claiming the card didn't have issues with IQ, performance or noise.

That same individual later turned out to be an nVidia shill.

 

[AtenRa]

Hmm, i only have the 5900 Ultra

 

[RussianSensation]

This card sure brings back memories of this forum. In particular there was a certain individual that used to parade around claiming the card didn't have issues with IQ, performance or noise.

That same individual later turned out to be an nVidia shill.

But it also brings memories of excellent IQ investigations and criticism which revolved around that generation, for both NV and ATI (angled AF blurring issues). Future generation reviews followed with very in-depth assessment of IQ between AMD and NV both at Anandtech and by very knowledgeable posters such as yourself. I miss those days, where now it's all about FPS and perf/watt. Even the very mention of IQ (NV's Full RGB via HDMI) seems to bring major arguments. Back then NV and ATI desperately tried to improve IQ with every generation due to how much gamers demanded it. It's good to see this trend continuing with MFAA, VSR and DSR this year but unfortunately besides HardOCP and GameGPU not many sites compare the quality of various AA settings.

I will admit I did recommend the FX5900XT on various occasions due to its bang for the buck during that era.

Hmm, i only have the 5900 Ultra

Ah the evolution of GPU heatsink design.

 

[Keysplayr]

This card sure brings back memories of this forum. In particular there was a certain individual that used to parade around claiming the card didn't have issues with IQ, performance or noise.

That same individual later turned out to be an nVidia shill.

Way to dig up the negative. :thumbsup:

5800U was definitely a sore spot for NV though. It performed ok enough, but the 9700pro overshadowed it most of the time.
Lava, I searched Ebay, Craigslist, and just followed a bunch of google searches to no where.

You may have to put out a WTB ad in several venues. Rare bird.

 

[Red Hawk]

It's a wonder that Nvidia kept their consumer reputation after the FX 5000 series. TWIMTBP probably helped dig them out of that hole.

 

[SlowSpyder]

This card sure brings back memories of this forum. In particular there was a certain individual that used to parade around claiming the card didn't have issues with IQ, performance or noise.

That same individual later turned out to be an nVidia shill.

Before I was a member here I used to read the forums, probably read the forums without joining for two years or so. I remember reading his posts back then. Had to give him credit, he could have a hundred people in a thread telling him he was wrong, but he never flinched.


Sorry OP, I have a Ti4800 laying around. A generation too early.

Speaking of which, I remember an old boss I had, he bragged to me about his 'upgrade' from a Ti4600 to an FX 5200. He kept telling me how the 4600 was fast, but the 5200 was faster because it's newer.

 

[DarkKnightDude]

I have a 5700 Ultra still lying around in the basement on the shelves.