What was your worst video card / graphics blunder?

[AlgaeEater]

Evga 7800GT ... had to RMA it to evga, got it back worse...

Exactly the same thing happened to me. I had my card RMA twice from EVGA due to overheating. The thermal pads on the ram would "dry out" and go bad. Out of all the video cards I've owned in my lifetime, I never saw one as messed up as that one right out of the box.

 

[WT]

Bought an MSI 5900 card as an open box from Newegg for $220 after they had come out. It was a helluva card with huge fans on both sides of the card. Unfortunately, when I opened the bag up a cap fell off as it came out.

My guess is someone had one of the boards that didn't closely follow the ATX spec on cap heighth and this particular cap on the card hit a tall cap on the board when the buyer inserted it.

Rather than return it (you couldn't find them available anywhere, as Nv had transitioned to all 5900 SE,XT cards), I taped it in place, tested it, then had a local store solder and epoxy it in place for $42.

Its still used and running to this day, but by and large it wasn't a great performer, but it still looks cool as hell.

http://wtslair.com/ProjectNF2/msi59001.jpeg


Edit: Ohh, just read about the above eVGA 7800 RMAs ... I was able to 'Step Up' to a 7900GT a few days before my window of opportunity closed up. The eVGA tech admitted that the 7800 cards were dying at a rather alarming rate. That 7900 card lasted 2 years, then started to display graphical glitches. RMA'd it and they sent me a 7950GX2 !!! Still working like a top today.

 

[AyashiKaibutsu]

The first time I plugged my 7800gs AGP in, and a alarm went off.
It scared the shit out of me, and took me an hour to figure out why.
Never had a card with a external power plug before.

Yea, that no power alarm is scary as hell. Makes you think you just completely destroyed your computer and all computers within 300 meters of you.

 

[CurseTheSky]

Yea, that no power alarm is scary as hell. Makes you think you just completely destroyed your computer and all computers within 300 meters of you.

Yep. Happened to me with my 6800 GT. It was the first computer I had ever completely built by myself as well, which REALLY freaked me out.

 

[AlucardX]

buying a:
Voodoo Banshee (would lock whole computer randomly when scrolling in IE)
FX5800 Ultra (dustbuster) - one fun thing was if a game crashed the fan would stay blasting like a lawn mower and had to reboot to get it to shut up.. what a waste of money.

 

[Ranulf]

Hmm, probably buying a gigabyte 6600 silent/fanless card to replace a ti4800. Mostly because I probably over paid for it price/performance wise but silence is golden after that albatron ti4800.

I regret buying a fx5200 for a computer I built for my mother but it at least kept the costs down and didn't cause any problems for her.

 

[manimal]

Trying to run a 7800GT passively in a low airflow htpc case. It lasted two months....Quietest computer I ever had... Memory went bad on it. Should have known better.

 

[thegimp03]

Bought a 9600 XT at Best Buy when I should have gone for the 9800 Pro which was sitting right above it for $100 more. Thankfully, it was Christmas money, but sadly, the 9800 Pro would have lasted 2-3 years longer and kept me from upgrading to a 6800 series card.

 

[Gikaseixas]

GeForce FX5200 and Radeon XT1600 Pro or whatever the name was

 

[jtisgeek]

Fx 5900 for me I do remember not waiting for the geforce I bought a tnt2 ultra like 3 months before it came out. Still a good card thought.

 

[SHAQ]

The 7800 GTX 512. I don't think it was worth $750 but it was damn nice. It was better than the 7900 GTX that replaced it in many ways. When I resold it a year later I think I only got $200 for it. lol Every other time I got about half my money back when I resold video cards. I remember not planning on buying it, but I added it to my cart anyway and the rest was just a blur. hmmm

 

[OVerLoRDI]

Had a 9700pro that I put a custom heatsink on. Shortly afterward it started to fail and artifact. Gave it to my friend who noticed that I had knocked something loose when installing the heatsink, resoldered it, kept it, and then beat me at UT2004 with it.

 

[Russwinters]

Getting the 5950 Ultra

 

[tweakboy]

All of them are good

NBA 2K best games ever ,,. and Im done... did it wow nice wheelen Pat..

 

[tweakboy]

What was the best,,,,,, U KNOW ,, hahha
All in Wonder and Matrox Millienium and Voodoobanshee Hercules lol... 5950 ultra,,

 

[imaheadcase]

Ordered 4 GTX 480s for quad sli and they blew out my underpowered PSU.

Buying the 3 other GTX 480s was the blunder.

 

[Mr. Pedantic]

"I" bought my 512MB 4870 about a week before the 4890 and 275 came out and caused 4870 prices to drop by NZ$200.

 

[Leyawiin]

Bought a Voodoo5 in 2002 before I knew what was going on with the company (was a gaming noob back then). In a year it really couldn't run much of anything I wanted to play and I was relying on hacked drivers for XP which I installed about six months after I bought it.

 

[aka1nas]

Worst blunder:

I picked up a Sapphire Radeon 9700 from Newegg, 11 months later it died. Contacted Sapphire and they instructed me that Newegg was in charge of their RMAs at that time. Contacted Newegg and they took it back and gave me a full credit to my card.

This was early December of that year, and the 9700 had already been replaced by the 9800. Newegg didn't have a single model of either card in stock. I wanted to get up and running again ASAP, so I ran down to Circuit City and grabbed their last 9800 Pro. Got home and installed it, and it was actually a 9800 SE in the box. I took it back to CC to exchange it, and not a single store within 50 miles had one left. I ended up returning it and getting a Geforce FX 5900, which as we all know ended up being a significant downgrade once Dx9 titles came out.

 

[Dolphindream]

Well, i was young and REALLY into upgrading my pc! I ordered new 8800 GTS 320MB, waited it for 2 weeks... NOT patiently... believe that! Finally, the delivery guy came (not a guy, quite a hot girl for my surprize, like i needed another adrenaline rush). Got my hands on a package, opened with a racing heart, wowd like 5 times (my current was then 7600gs so this new was as thick as a brick for me), plugged it into pci-e slot, hit the power button... nothing happened. The dmn thing didnt boot... i was like after all that waiting... it dont work... tried everything, nothing worked (not much to try but i tried it all, lol). Was angry and sad, put the old one back... and went to cry over some forum, lol. Took me like half an hour to learn... that... there are things like additional power connectors. I even remeber thinking, what this little thingi is for :\ but moved on since i didnt have a clue. Well, switched it back, plugged the connector... while being afraid to burn the card with a wrong connector. Hit the power button again... watched the boot screen with glassed eyes as it BOOTED, finally! Wowed alot while doing 3dmark test too...

Yeah, scary and fun times it was...

My little story

 

[Imp]

May have smoked a $115 Diamond card with an Nvidia chip, way before GeForce, it was the Voodoo era.

The piece of crap didn't support OpenGL, and I was trying to place Team Fortress Classic with it after installing some unsupported reference drivers. Lo and behold, it worked, but kept locking up, creating artifacts, until it wouldn't boot anymore. We weren't that tech-knowledgable then, so never tried to uninstall and reinstall the drivers, or Windows. Maybe it works, maybe not, but we wrote it off and people who shared the computer were pissed.

 

[Oyeve]

I bought a GeForce MX 440 on launch day in FL thinking it would spank my GF3, taking it home to NY (1100 miles away) only to find out my GF3 was actually much faster. At least I realized MX sucked and avoided all things MX.

 

[LxMxFxD4]

The guy who bought the card over the TNT2 - epic!

My worst card purchase was an X800 Vanilla. That market at the time was soo terrible. $200 got you an X800 while $300 got you something only slightly faster. Just bad few months. But I needed PCI-express in th enew mobo and all I had was an AGP 5700 ultra!

 

[pm]

My stupidest blunder was buying a ATI Mach 64 2MB card back in about June of 1994. I wanted it to drive a 20" CRT at a higher resolution. I paid over $200 for it which was an insane amount of money to me back then (it's still alot actually). It worked fine and did what I wanted on Windows 3.1 but when Windows 95 came out less than 4 months later, ATI wouldn't release drivers for it. So I had to buy a new video card - another roughly $200 - for Windows 95 less than 4 months later.

 

[Soulkeeper]

A few years ago I didn't secure the clamps on a water cooling setup properly and spilled water all over my ti4200 while it was running ...
ended up having to replace it with an fx5200 which was a downgrade and live with that for a year+