Video card lookback Nvidia Geforce 4 Ti and 6600/6800 series

[mohit9206]

Well whenever i want to read about old video cards from back in the day i have to visit the articles and forum discussions from that time to get info about the cards.So i feel i should start a thread in which we can discuss specific old cards and look back at them and how we feel about them today.
So today i want us guys to discuss and share your thoughts about the Nvidia Geforce 4 series which included the Ti4200/4400 and 4600 cards AND
Geforce 6 series which included the 6600gt/6800gt/Ultra cards.
So did any of you own these particular cards back in the day? How do you feel looking back at those cards?Did they serve you well?Any fond or bad memories associated with them? Any interesting stories or trivia related to these cards?
Please share your thoughts related to these cards only.

 

[Killrose]

I had a 6800Ultra and it was an awesome card. I had it at a time they were pretty much top dog. They could get noisey. This was at the same time motherboards had bad cap issues and my Epox 8rda fried taking my 6800 with it. I think I went x800xt after that? or maybe X1800 or something. Been back and forth with NV and Ati thru the years.

 

[pete6032]

The TI-4600 was the first top of the line video card I owned. I remember playing Unreal II on it and being blown away by the graphics.

GeForce 6800 series, I remember the only difference between the 6800 GT and 6800 Ultra was a few hundred mhz clock speed. Got the card right when it came out and dropped $400 on it. That was the first card I ever bought a 3rd party cooler for. I remember playing through Half Life 2 on that thing with my water cooled ABIT NF7-S running an insanely over clocked Athlon processor. That was actually the last fan-cooled card I ever bought for myself. I don't game much anymore so I've only bought passively cooled cards since then. I think the card fried when my water cooling leaked on it. Fun times.

Sent from my Nexus 5X using Tapatalk

 

[Hi-Fi Man]

Love my 6800 GT, they didn't clock high and used quite a bit of power due to IBM's 130nm process the GPUs were made on but they were much better than what they replaced. It's an AGP card and just started to artifact recently and I think a lot of those cards back then with the early GDDR3 died early because of the RAM.

I had it in my older PC until it started artifacting.
Athlon 64 X2 4400+ 2.2GHz socket 939 Toledo 1MiB L2
MSI K8N Neo2 Platinum nForce 3 Ultra
4x1GiB DDR 400 MT/s
Adaptec PCI SCSI320 card w/Seagate Cheetah 15K.5 146GB
Windows XP

 

[DeathReborn]

I remember being on a strict budget back then and the arguing over whether to get a 6600GT + Athlon 64 130nm (my choice) or a X600XT + Athlon 64 130nm (brother choice) took so long that we ended up buying a Athlon 64 90nm & 6800GT OC for less money. Those were the days...

The 4 series I started with a 4200 but replaced it inside 4 months with a 4600 which survived the entire FX debacle.

 

[moonbogg]

Both of these cards are significant for me. I had a Ti4600 and loved that card. That was the card that woke me up to the reality that building your own rig was better than buying one.
I had an HP that my dad bought me and I was excited to put the 4600 in there, so I did. I was upset because my benchmarks were too low compared to those on the web. My friends blamed it on my HP and I thought they were being sarcastic. They weren't.
My HP had a 1.5ghz (if I remember right) Pentium CPU in it and that was comparable to the others on the market, or so I thought. I knew nothing about IPC or AMD CPU's being better. I built my first rig with an AMD CPU, put the card in and it hauled ass. I was astonished and have been building rigs ever since.

The 6800GT was a great deal because it was powerful, less expensive than the ultra and it was the first series of cards to support SLI. So I had to buy two of them and they WRECKED Doom 3. It was awesome. This was also the PC build that I did new from the ground up, all new parts including my awesome Logitech Z5500 speakers which I still use to this day.
It was my first experience with real 5.1 surround sound, SLI and one of the fastest AMD CPU's out at the time. It was thrilling and worth every penny.

 

[Leyawiin]

Had a 6800 GT AGP with a nice Arctic Cooling NV cooler on it. It looked like brand new when I gave it away to someone on the HardOCP forums. I like it quite a lot with an Athlon XP 2500+ OC'd to 3200+ (although I know it was bottlenecked by it).

 

[Adored]

6600GT owner here, I liked the performance though I had a few issues with drivers in WoW especially.

 

[Rvenger]

Owned 3x Ti4200s... actually reviewed 2 of them years ago. I recall the 64mb versions were faster if I am not mistaken.

 

[Zodiark1593]

I remember being absolutely blown away playing Doom 3 on a friend's 6600GT. I'd been on the PS2 before.

 

[EXCellR8]

I still have a pair of BFG Tech 6800GT's lying around somewhere... as well as the rest of my Athlon XP build. Yup, those were the days.

 

[moonbogg]

I think this was also around the time I started buying all my stuff online. I remember buying the Ti4600 at an actual store, but the 6800GT's were bought online I think.

 

[Zodiark1593]

Anyone have any AGP cards I could toss into an old Athlon XP desktop I have here? Wonder if I could get Minecraft going.

 

[TheVrolok]

Loved my 6800GT.

 

[HeXen]

I still have a lot of my old Nvidia cards including the Geforce 3. I think I have an old TNT card too. For some reason I never get around to selling my old cards, just not much into Ebay and stuff like that.

Typically when I think of old video cards, I always think of this

 

[Raduque]

I have a 6800 AGP that still works. It's currently paired with an AMD x2 3800+ on an Epox mobo, I think with an nVidia chipset. My 7800GS died an untimely death and the chip package lives on my keychain now.

I wonder whatever happened to my Radeon 9700 Pro. Still know where my rare Voodoo 5 5500 is though.

 

[Magic Carpet]

Owned 3x Ti4200s...

Great cards, the only thing I hated about them is the stock cooler. Waaaaaaay too loud to just read a web page. There were exceptions though, such as this:

Swapped my Gainward 4200 for that ^, purely because of that smart double sided heatsink (still single-slot).

Other than that, I had to literally mod every card. Back then, they all sounded like hoovers (5800 Ultra's taking the cake).

 

[mojothehut]

Went digging around my closet
Found them!
EVGA 6800 Ultra (ugly graphic on the heatsink!)
PNY Ti4200 64mb.. purdy

 

[SPARTAN VI]

I had a XFX 6600GT PCI-E and BFG 6800 AGP between my two machines. Probably the epitome of bang-for-buck at the time, and for years after. I don't think I could get by at 1080P max settings with the present $200-range offerings.

Eventually I went backwards and grabbed a GeForce4 Ti 4600 to drop into a HTPC, but it was used and didn't last long enough.

 

[poofyhairguy]

Typically when I think of old video cards, I always think of this

Me too, I still have it and look at it often. That card plus CS 1.x were the most fun I ever had gaming.

 

[JimmiG]

I bought the GF3 Ti500 months before the GeForce 4 series came out. So I basically paid 50% more for 80% of the performance of the Ti4200.

Apparently, the GeForce 4 series were ready for release, but due to the lack of competition, Nvidia held on to them and released the rebranded GeForce 3 cards first to compete with the Radeon 8500.

I then switched to the Radeon 9700 which made me feel better, considering the massive failure of NV30/5800.

 

[Deders]

I still have a lot of my old Nvidia cards including the Geforce 3. I think I have an old TNT card too. For some reason I never get around to selling my old cards, just not much into Ebay and stuff like that.

Typically when I think of old video cards, I always think of this

I had one of these, iirc it was able to handle most games about as well as my TNT2 Mach64 (mach implies speed, until I realised the 64 meant the memory bus was cut in half) could handle them in 32bit, better in some cases due to Glide.

I upgraded from this to a Geforce3, in a new system that had an AMD Thunderbird 1.4GHz chip (upgrade from PII 350), so when the Geforce 4 came along I figured performance was so close, there wasn't much point upgrading for me, although looking back I probably would have seen a difference in some cases, just not enough to justify the price.

Most PC gamers I knew personally at the time were using the Geforce 4 MX which was based on one of the cards from the Geforce 2 range, and had no pixel/vertex shaders.

My 2nd card after the Geforce 3 was the 6600GT. It had almost as much power as the 6800, but for half the price (iirc?).

For me it was a great card, it had 8 pixel pipelines, which I felt all DX9 cards should have had to start with (Damn you FX) and was able to deal with Pixel and Vertex shaders much better than the FX range, just like AMD had been doing all along.

 

[therealnickdanger]

I was really hoping to come in here and see benchmarks of these cards on modern systems. That's always fun.

 

[nerp]

The 6600GT was killer. It was a hugely successful card and was awesome price performance. I bought it and remember being happy to finally get nice smooth framerates with CS:S on my machine at the time, I think an XP3200+ barton chip. I then moved up to an Opteron 148 and then an Opteron 165, both were amazing chips at the peak of AMD's brief dominance. Those were the days. Everyone had a 6600GT it seemed.

 

[alcoholbob]

Geforce 4 Ti4400 and it was fantastic. I remember back in the day you could buy a Nvidia GPU and it could still be decent after a few generations. Whereas today one generation behind Keplar can be total garbage compared to Maxwell in new games until it finally gets patched months later...