Worst Graphics Card Purchases

[Schmide]

Let me count the unique yet quickly useless 3DLabs GLINT 300SX, RIVA TNT 5v agp kill your motherboard, KYRO 3D Prophet, matrox g400 cards I bought.

I threw some money at a geforce2go to upgrade my dell laptop. Waste

Oh and I bought 2 GeForce3 for $400 a piece when they were new. Doh.

 

[ShreddedWheat]

9600xt by ATi, got it for $149.xx with free dl of HL2 when it came out. Card just couldn't handle many games at the time with the settings higher than medium. Doom 3 was a joke on this card, very depressing at the time. My friends 9500 pro flashed to 9700 was way faster.

 

[Cookie Monster]

I could think of two. One was when I had a Radeon 7500 and had this upgraded to GF4 MX440 because some games wont run due to not supporting DX8. Shoud've went with the GF4 Ti 4200.
Getting an FX5700 (+3.0Ghz P4) over the 9800Pro (+ 2.8GHz P4).

Dont know what I was thinking back then.

 

[ShawnD1]

Originally posted by: ShreddedWheat
9600xt by ATi, got it for $149.xx with free dl of HL2 when it came out. Card just couldn't handle many games at the time with the settings higher than medium. Doom 3 was a joke on this card, very depressing at the time. My friends 9500 pro flashed to 9700 was way faster.

I had a Radeon 9600XT. What a piece of shit. The drivers were horrible and it could just barely run Doom 3 at 1024x768. It worked for a while then it started drawing distorted images in games like BF1942. I owned the card for less than a year before I replaced it, and I haven't owned a discrete ATI video card since then.

Radeon 7200 was another bad card I had. It worked great for Half-Life and its mods, but using any driver from ATI"s website would cripple the frame rate. The only drivers that worked were the ones that came on the CD. Another problem was that the composite video output was in black and white. Why couldn't it output color? I have no idea.

 

[thilanliyan]

Originally posted by: ShawnD1
I had a Radeon 9600XT. What a piece of shit. The drivers were horrible and it could just barely run Doom 3 at 1024x768. It worked for a while then it started drawing distorted images in games like BF1942. I owned the card for less than a year before I replaced it, and I haven't owned a discrete ATI video card since then.

I'm just guessing here but I think ATI's OpenGL drivers back then were not so great and IIRC Doom3 was in OpenGL. I also had a 9600XT and it wasn't so bad for me...but then I didn't play Doom3.

 

[Wreckage]

I never had a bad purchase per se, but I did buy several cards only to see them cheaper or with a free game within a few weeks.

 

[HOOfan 1]

Originally posted by: Fox5
Geforce 3 TI200. Assy vga output quality, poor performance (and that's coming from a voodoo3), and tons of driver problems.
.

I still have a Geforce 3 Ti 200...I actually still play older games on it...even Splinter Cell Pandora Tomorrow looks pretty good on it.

Problem was, I ordered it in November 2001, received it January 2002. The Ti 4600 came out in February 2002...I was pissed.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Originally posted by: superunknown98
Heh, not so much a regret but pretty much any Trident based Jaton video card from the mid to late nineties. You could pick them up at any computer show for 75 bucks or less and get horrid D3D performance. In fact none of the trident cards I had would output D3D correctly. Probably drivers issue, but i digress. Great 2D though!

I think I bought one of those. Had 2D driver problems too, absolutely horrid card.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Originally posted by: thecoolnessrune
Got a GeForce 4 MX 420 64MB card thinking I would be able to game on it. 800x600 all low settings in UT2K4 and still only getting an average of 15FPS was fairly disappointing.

Wow, I can plan UT2004 at 1024x768 on my laptop's IGP (Radeon X200 or something like that) at better frame rates!

 

[brblx]

my geforce2mx was mostly worthless. i could play the same titles i was playing on it on my tnt2, and when more advanced stuff came out it was too underpowered to bother with. i quit playing games until i bought a 9800 maybe two years later. that was a good card. my x850 wasn't terrible but was another 'blah' upgrade.

 

[Rhoxed]

nvidia 7800GT (250$)

and

nvidia 8600GTS (190$)

pure "ouch"

 

[Stumps]

hmmm let me see, worst Video cards...

Diamond Stealth 3D 2000 4mb (S3 Virge), I remember it was touted by S3 as a 3D gaming card...but couldn't do any 3d graphics to save itself.

Creative Graphics Blaster 3D Value 32mb (TNT2 M64), I should have got the gigabyte model sitting on the shelve next to it...the creative version was the slowest of all the TNT2 M64's...it was barely faster than my old creative Savage 4 32mb that I was upgrading from).

Gigabyte Radeon 9500 64mb, It wasn't a huge jump from my trusty Gigabyte Radeon 8500LE. even when I soft modded it to a 9500 Pro it still wasn't a spectacular as everybody made the 9500 Pro out to be, I replaced it with in a week with my mighty Gigabyte Radeon 9700 Pro (my best graphics card purchase and still my fav card of all time) which I still have in it original packaging.

Asus V9999GT 128mb (6800GT), while I did use it for awhile, it wasn't a huge leap in performance over my 9700 pro...and it cost a bloody fortune AU$699.

My Favorite...

Actix Graphix Engine 32 (S3 805B) My first real graphics card purchase, I used it for many years in my 386 and 486. I used to laugh at my friends who had faster 486's or Pentiums with Tridents in them that could run games as smoothly as my PC usued too.

Creative 3D Blaster VLB (Redention Verite 1000), Vquake used to kick ass with this card....the most expensive PC component I have ever purchased, a whopping AU$749 way back in 1995.

3DFX Voodoo 2 SLI, 1024x768 gaming was pretty sweet...and two 3D cards look cool as well, I still have these puppies.

Gigabyte 9700 PRO, this was a huge jump over what I had been using and lasted me almost 4 years before I upgraded to my over priced 6800GT.

Sapphire X1950 Pro AGP, I got the first one to arrive in Australia and it provided me with a years worth of decent gaming, it was pretty cheap too, it now resides in an older rig.

 

[apoppin]

maybe you guys will all hate me
[more ]

i don't have ANY regrets
- there were NO bad video card purchases by me

 

[Stumps]

Originally posted by: apoppin
maybe you guys will all hate me
[more ]

i don't have ANY regrets
- there were NO bad video card purchases by me

Boo-urns

 

[severus]

8800gt. Had an x1950pro and on my res this upgrade was pointless. Now I bought a new monitor and an HD4870 1gb. 8800gt has been sent to the 3rd rate pc in the house.

 

[dflynchimp]

I went from Radeon 9600XT to Geforce 7900GT to Geforce 8800GTS 320MB to Radeon HD 4870X2. Overall I'd say each upgrade was around 2X or faster than the previous card, which is a rule of the thumb for me.

$155 for the 9600XT
$280 for the 7900GT
$280 for the 8800GTS
$350 for the 4870X2

I'd say generally these were good choices, but given price/performance ratio the 4870X2 is slightly worse for the matter, but not by much, as I found it for the price when msrp was still $450. The main beef was because at the moment I don't need the horsepower to run 1920X1200 so the benefits over the 8800GTS (outside of Crysis and Far Cry and the usual benchmark games) weren't showing through

 

[Spikesoldier]

1. ATi AIW Radeon 8500DV 64MB ($400)
2. Sapphire Radeon HD3850 256MB ($150)

 

[kreacher]

My 8800GTS 640 MB for $320 a few months before NVidia released the 8800GT.

 

[faxon]

Originally posted by: kreacher
My 8800GTS 640 MB for $320 a few months before NVidia released the 8800GT.

i feel your pain there. i got my 2900PRO 1GB back before i really got into that whole reading reviews thing. it was a christmas present, and the budget was $400 (my 8 year old sister was getting an american girl doll for a similar price, my parents were being fair, since i wasnt an adult yet at the time). i should have got an 8800GTS 512 (G92) but instead i was a moron and went for the pretty 512bit bus and the 1GB frame buffer cause i thought they would give me the biggest boost (lmao). i ended up replacing the card with a 9800GTX 512 a couple months ago for a TRUE in a trade. still, the 2900PRO was leaps and bounds above what i had been dealing with for the last year, and i was still super super happy with the results, though for the price i probably should have got 2 8800GTS 640s used for like $200 and SLIed them (had an SLI mobo at the time)

 

[nemesismk2]

Originally posted by: Modelworks

Originally posted by: AlucardX
Voodoo banshee - one of the first 2d/3d cards.. was so wonderful that it froze randomly when scrolling in IE, helped a little if you turned off smooth scrolling. and this was in the days when the IE alternatives weren't that great.

.

Yeah they were awful. I had a pc with the banshee and the creative labs sb live with the crappy drivers. Talk about a nightmare combination. I couldn't play an Mp3 and scroll the browser at the same time /

Yeah I forgot about the trouble I had with my 2themax 3dfx Banshee. I know it might seem hard to believe but I replaced it with a Diamond Savage4 Pro which performed much better and had better drivers.

 

[nemesismk2]

Originally posted by: InflatableBuddha
Radeon 9200 SE (sucker edition) in late 2002.

The drivers were solid, the card worked well and didn't artifact, but it wasn't quite the phenomenal upgrade I was anticipating. While I was able to turn up the settings on Max Payne, I couldn't quite max out the game, and I thought I'd be able to do that easily.

I should have saved up more cash and bought something a bit more powerful.

I thought I was upgrading from a Radeon 9000 to a Radeon 9200 and then found out that it wasn't an upgrade at all because my Radeon 9000 was faster than the Radeon 9200

 

[Golgatha]

Originally posted by: Keitero
I bought a Rage Fury MAXX back in the day. Need I say more?

Original ATI Radeon 64MB. The drivers and hardware were just horrible.

 

[Stumps]

Originally posted by: Golgatha

Originally posted by: Keitero
I bought a Rage Fury MAXX back in the day. Need I say more?

Original ATI Radeon 64MB. The drivers and hardware were just horrible.

the Orginal Radeon's performed quite well incomparison to the GF2 GTS, but yes they where let down badly by their drivers...which pretty much persisted all the way up to the 8500.

I still have my Radeon DDR somewhere in a cupboard....

 

[Grinja]

ATI Rage pro 4MB (upgradable to 8MB ) My very first 3D card was ... openGL drivers were only available for WinNT and were really late coming to Win 98.
I should really have paid up and gotten a 3dfx Voodoo at the time.

GeForce 1 SDR version. Man I really wish I waited for the DDR versions to drop in price!

 

[TurtleCrusher]

X1550 256mb. Newegg listed this Powercolor card having a 128-bit memory bus (double nearly every other one, a huge selling point) but it didn't. $40 down the toilet.

It had a 32-bit DDR2 memory bus. I'm not fucking kidding. Below is powercolors website stating said 32-bit bus.

http://www.powercolor.com/eng/...res.asp?ProductID=1631

EDIt: It was a powercolor, my next card was an ASUS.