Worst Graphics Card Purchases

[Pneumothorax]

Originally posted by: sharad


Now I have a Radeon 4770. Best purchase of this year, so far.

I consider my recent purchase of a 4770 as one of my bigger mistakes, considering a superior 4870 can be had for $15 more.

My worst purchase was a Geforce Fx 5220 that POS turned me off Nvidia for a couple of generations.

 

[Negronpope]

Savage 2000? How about the Savage 4? Really dreadful! I rather liked the early Rage 128 Pro card that replaced it (but then it had twice the memory and an ATI theater chip). As far as early Radeons, I didn't have many problems with them until the 8500 (and even that is superior to a 9200).
Favorite old cards? The Radeon 9700, it held its value for years.

 

[IndyColtsFan]

I was looking for a new graphic card a few years ago, and had my heart set on the Radeon 9800 Pro. So, I went to Best Buy and they had the GeForce FX5600 Ultra on sale for a ridiculously low price. I had heard about the performance issues but the price was so ridiculously low that I figured it couldn't hurt.

I got it home, stuck it in my machine, and noticed the issue right away (I think it was an issue with Shader 2.0+, IIRC). So I went back to Best Buy, got the Radeon 9800 Pro, and that was my main card until I got my 6800 GT.

It wasn't a total loss -- I kept the 5600 and it was used for years in my HTPC. It is actually still in the HTPC to this day, but I have the system powered off.

 

[Zap]

Alright, here are my...

Worst:

Trident 512KB ISA
It was in my first computer and I thought I had it going on... until I found out it didn't support more than 8-bit color (256 colors). I replaced it with a Tseng Labs ET4000 1MB that did "high-color" (15-bit, 32k colors).

Matrox M3D PCI
It was an add-on 3D accelerator around the time of the original Voodoo. I'm not sure I ever got it to work... or else none of my games supported it. I don't quite remember exactly what I got after this, maybe Voodoo 2 after it came out.

S3 Savage 3D 32MB AGP
It was a crappy graphics chip on a crappy board by some nameless overseas sweat shop. Performed pretty poor. I sold it on Ebay for $1, and the fucker who bought it filed a complaint against me saying I sold him a defective card because his old NVIDIA 8MB card outperformed it, and "32MB should outperform 8MB." It was probably in one of my secondary machines and was probably replaced by a Voodoo 3 or GeForce GTS or something.

Gainward "Golden Sample" GeForce FX 5600 Ultra AGP
I thought I had it going on because I managed to score this card - it was the coveted "flip chip" version of the FX 5600 Ultra meaning it ran 50MHz faster and looked totally HOT with red PCB and a red flame/fireball shaped heatsink. Well, it still wasn't fast enough, plus the fan sounded totally like an FX 5800 Ultra, if'n ya know what I mean.

ATI Radeon 9600 XT AGP
I was building a killer overclocked Athlon setup using an Nforce 2 chipset motherboard and got this from a friend through a trade. Alas, the card did NOT work on that Nforce 2 board, though it worked fine on VIA/Intel chipset boards and other cards (including other Radeons) worked fine on that Nforce 2 board.

MSI GeForce FX 5900 XT AGP
I actually liked this card, so why is it on my "worst" list? Well, MSI sent out totally cherry cards to review sites. I can't quite prove it beyond the fact that the review cards had faster memory on it than the retailing cards, but my experience was that probably without fail the reviewers all got completely awesome overclocks on it. Between my friends and I, we had probably three of these cards. None of them would overclock enough to be worth the trouble.

PNY GeForce 6600 GT PCI Express
The card itself was pretty average. Why I list it on my "worst" list is because it was hands down the worst rebate experience I have experienced, and I still didn't get the $40 that PNY owes me.

Gigabyte Radeon HD 2600 Pro PCI Express
I bought this for my HTPC because I wanted something quiet (whole card covered by one gigantic passive heatsink) and I figured I would play some games on my (at the time) new 42" 1080p screen. Well, not only was the performance pretty lame, the thing overheats within minutes during gaming. Unfortunately I still have it in my HTPC, a few years later. It still overheats and locks up.

Various Sapphire Radeon X800 series (X800XL, X800XT, etc.)
At one time a few years ago I bought a number of these cards and had a really high failure rate, probably 50% or so. They also hassled on an RMA.

XFX GeForce 8600 GTS PCI Express
This was an RMA replacement for a 7900 GT. While performance was close, I still think I got the shorter end of the stick. Also, XFX sent out an oddball card. They've removed it from their site, but at the time they claimed that this "special" 8600 GTS was the only one in the whole world that had a 256-bit memory interface, and because of this required a special PCIe power adapter that fed +5v in the middle between the two +12v wires of an otherwise normal 6-pin PCIe power plug. First, the 256-bit thing was an outright lie. Second, the 6-pin power plug was keyed exactly the same as a normal PCIe power plug, but plugging in a normal one would cause the card to not put out a picture. You absolutely HAD to use their provided adapter. See the manufacturer response (search for "rundausaurus") under the Newegg reviews for this card. Newegg's description originally also said 256-bit, but was retroactively edited after they sold a bunch.

Of course the opposite of the worst is the...

Best:

Tseng Labs ET4000 1MB ISA
Two things about this card. First was that it was my first upgrade, and I thougth I actually saw a performance difference... until I saw my system run Wing Commander next to my roommates system with a Trident card (albeit a crippled one with 256k on an 8-bit ISA bus versus mine on 16-bit). Mine was pretty much in real time while my roommate's was in slow motion. This was my first introduction to upgrading and performance differences. The second thing about this card was that it supported "high-color." I actually was able to see a difference between JPG and GIF files. OMG, the amount of time I spent in abpe* (for those that know usenet). :laugh:

Tseng Labs ET4000W32 VLB
Another jump in performance. Wow! It is like going from PCI to PCIe. It was my first "Windows Accelerator" and was in the first computer I built from scratch.

Tseng Labs ET6000 PCI
A solid evolution to PCI. It was as fast and much cheaper compared to much more expensive cards such as the Matrox Millenium. I still have two of these cards to this date. Too bad Tseng Labs never made the transition to accelerating 3D.

Matrox G200 AGP
While some hate this card, I liked it enough. I think for around 2 weeks (which is right when I bought it) it was the fastest 3D card that money can buy. Seriously, 2 weeks! It worked well enough with Windows games, but the problem was that people at the time were still playing stuff like Quake 2 and the DOS OpenGL wrapper was nearly stillborn. Why I liked this card is that it taught me how to overclock and tweak things other than the CPU. Basically Quake 3 happened, and I found out I was running a blazing 14FPS on my G200. I found some tweaking program for the G200 that allowed me to clock up the G200 chip as well as memory, plus tweak a number of latency settings in the card. I must have had a good card and decent cooling because I didn't know what I was doing so I just pretty much maxed out everything, and it worked! I pretty much doubled my Quake 3 framerate by running this program and sticking a fan on the tiny heatsink.

Voodoo 3 2000 PCI
At the time I was running a Pentium III 550 Coppermine in an Asus BX chipset board and had the FSB overclocked to the BIOS max of 150MHz. This resulted in an 825MHz CPU and unfortunately a 150MHz SDRAM clock and 100MHz AGP clock. I was able to find some RAM that worked at 150MHz (some Kingston PC100 CAS 2 stuff that was magic). I was unable to find an AGP card at the time that would tolerate the 100MHz bus speed (default 66MHz). My solution? A PCI Voodoo 3. PCI bus was overclocked to 37.5MHz but the card worked fine, and with a spare heatsink frag-taped to the back of the card I was able to overclock it to pretty much Voodoo 3 3500 levels. This card rocked in Quake 3 (what I was still playing at the time).

Connect3D Radeon X800 GTO PCI express
My first successful experience with unlocking disabled parts of cores. I had played around with GeForce 6800 LE but the one I owned definately had faulty disabled pipes. This X800 GTO was unlocked and rocked! It also was a solid card, unlike most of the Sapphire cards I bought around that time.

ECS GeForce 8800 GT PCI Express
I decided I wanted a quieter machine while I was working towards my Masters degree. This 8800 GT was factory overclocked by 50MHz and came with an Arctic Cooling Accelero S1 pre-installed. Basically, yes, I can have performance as well as quiet. It was kind of a "proof of concept" eye opener for me.

BFG GeForce GTX 285 PCI Express
This is what I currently use. Why do I call it "best?" Because it is! Besides sometimes using better components, BFG also bins cards for various factory overclocks. My card is air-cooled, but was pulled from the liquid cooled bins which are higher clock. Not only that, I personally had asked one of the guys doing the binning to push a bunch of passed cards harder. I took his top 10 cards and personally tested them, and purchased the best one. Thus, I literally have the ONE best card out of thousands.

 

[sharad]

Originally posted by: Zap
Alright, here are my...

Worst:

ATI Radeon 9600 XT AGP
I was building a killer overclocked Athlon setup using an Nforce 2 chipset motherboard and got this from a friend through a trade. Alas, the card did NOT work on that Nforce 2 board, though it worked fine on VIA/Intel chipset boards and other cards (including other Radeons) worked fine on that Nforce 2 board.

I posted about this card a few pages back, although mine hated VIA chipset motherboards and worked for max 10 minutes in 3D games before locking up the whole PC. Bad times.

 

[zebrax2]

Originally posted by: Zap

S3 Savage 3D 32MB AGP
It was a crappy graphics chip on a crappy board by some nameless overseas sweat shop. Performed pretty poor. I sold it on Ebay for $1, and the fucker who bought it filed a complaint against me saying I sold him a defective card because his old NVIDIA 8MB card outperformed it, and "32MB should outperform 8MB." It was probably in one of my secondary machines and was probably replaced by a Voodoo 3 or GeForce GTS or something.

:laugh:

 

[Dribble]

Worst:
Geforce 4200ti refurbished - first attempt at o/c a video card. got it cheap, checked it worked (quick run of 3dmk), modded it by putting heatsinks on the memory. Then tried it in anger and found it locked up when doing serious gaming. Unfortunately I'd modded it so couldn't send it back. Learnt a lesson there.

Best:
Voodoo 3 2000: My first true 3d card, played everything I had at the time without error, I was happy.
8800Gt: Gets on the list because it's lasted so well. Bought it almost 2 years ago and still have it today. I can afford to replace it but being as it still plays all the games I like at high settings with good fps can't justify it. Considering the 8800GT wasn't top of the range, or particularly expensive that's good value.

 

[calyco]

Worst would probably be the FX5500 or GeForce MX series, weak cards. I would say the X700 but not really fair since I bought it a bit late (discrete card in Asus notebook). No shader 3.0 support made it useless for more recent games, only a few months after buying it.

Best would be the Ti4200 OC. Also pretty happy with my recent GTX 260

 

[MODEL3]

Originally posted by: Arkaign
I had a Verite 1000 card, and some other oddball stuff, but really until the Riva TNT, there wasn't a credible challenge in the 3d gaming arena. And ATI didn't really break out until the Radeon.

Did Carmack tricked you into buying Verite 1000?

Nvidia did't have good drivers up to the release of Quake3 at Q4 1999 (although some with desagree, saying instead "Q3 2004 with the release of DOOM3".

 

[gevorg]

ATI All-in-Wonder Radeon 9700 Pro for $430, back in 2003. Should have went with the non AIW model for much less.

 

[TejTrescent]

I would be inclined to say the FX5200 PCI that I had, but when my ECS board bit the dust and took my 6800 with it, that thing pretty much saved my desktop from being junk.

Nah, it pretty much takes the cake still. It's barely still working.

Best purchase? Gotta be my Diamond HD3850 that came at 3870 clocks (the dual-slot one), or my brother's HD4670. Both were pretty cheap and run pretty much everything we respectively throw at them. Probably just going to stick with my 3850 until the DX11 stuff is out, it's overclocked pretty well the few times I've tried.

 

[Arkaign]

Originally posted by: MODEL3

Originally posted by: Arkaign
I had a Verite 1000 card, and some other oddball stuff, but really until the Riva TNT, there wasn't a credible challenge in the 3d gaming arena. And ATI didn't really break out until the Radeon.

Did Carmack tricked you into buying Verite 1000?

Nvidia did't have good drivers up to the release of Quake3 at Q4 1999 (although some with desagree, saying instead "Q3 2004 with the release of DOOM3".

Heh well, my brother bought the card, I think there were only two games it worked with. $200 was a lot of money back then; heck it still is.

I preferred the Voodoo2 to the TNT, but IMHO the TNT was the first time there was a 3D card that worked well enough in enough popular games at a decent price, to be considered a credible challenger. It also helped that you didn't *need* a 2d card along with the 3d cards any more, although the 2d quality, while fast, was usually a bit muddy on many Nvidia boards for a long time. I remember my Ti200 looking like I was looking at my desktop through a murky aquarium.

 

[nitromullet]

Originally posted by: Zap
BFG GeForce GTX 285 PCI Express
This is what I currently use. Why do I call it "best?" Because it is! Besides sometimes using better components, BFG also bins cards for various factory overclocks. My card is air-cooled, but was pulled from the liquid cooled bins which are higher clock. Not only that, I personally had asked one of the guys doing the binning to push a bunch of passed cards harder. I took his top 10 cards and personally tested them, and purchased the best one. Thus, I literally have the ONE best card out of thousands.

So, what are your clocks on this magical GTX 285?

 

[zebrax2]

Worst would be this fx5500 that i am still using now (no money for upgrade :frown. I never really did any research back then. I just bought whatever nvidia card would fit in my price range since my previous card was nvidia (and of course i was one of those people who think that the higher the model number the better it is).

 

[FalseChristian]

I feel quite embarrassed to admit this but I paid $763 Canadian for a Sapphire Radeon X800 Pro VIVO which had 12 pipes. I thought I was the man for flashing the BIOS to get 16 pipes working.:beer:

Oops! Sorry, double post.:shocked:

 

[DrBombcrater]

Worst

Creative Labs Graphics Blaster Exxtreme PCI
Absolutely the worst graphics card I've ever known. Whoever decided using the Permedia 2 chip on a consumer 3D card was a good idea needed shooting. Every game I ever tried ran like cold treacle no matter how low the detail settings. Quake 3 barely managed 5 fps even with every single driver tweak and low detail hack. And the chip couldn't do alpha blending under D3D so 3DLabs had the driver do it in software; but Creative's drivers didn't, so there was a choice of a crushingly slow driver with normal image quality or a just very slow one with black artefacts all over the place. When my brother saw Homeworld running on this card he described it as 'bricks in space'

NVidia GeForce 2 MX AGP
The only card I've ever had to ditch because the signal quality was so poor. It looked like someone had smeared grease all over the monitor. And it was built by some scrubby no-name Chinese company that used memory so miserably slow that the thing often got lower FPS than the TNT2 I had before it.

Asus V9999 GeForce 6800 AGP
An oddball card this; a 12-pipe 6800 GPU mated to just 128MB of slow clocked DDR memory. Performance was really miserable. It lost to a 128MB 6600GT in almost every game even with all 16 pipelines unlocked via Rivatuner. And had a blower cooling fan that must have been designed by the same guy that did the FX5800's dustbuster.

GeForce FX 5900XT 128MB AGP
Didn't seem like actually such a bad deal when it was bought, but I've never seen any card become obsolete so quickly. A big, noisy white elephant.


Best

3DFx Voodoo Banshee 16MB AGP
Not a card you'd normally associate with the word 'best' ( ) but this was my upgrade from the abominable Permedia 2 and I loved it. Drivers that actually worked with most games, nice-ish image quality and good enough performance. Everything the Permedia 2 didn't have, in other words.

Inno3D GeForce 7300GT GDDR3 256MB PCI-e
Another oddball, but in a good way this time. 7300GTs were normally clocked at 350MHz with 667MHz DDR2, but these were shipped with the GPU O/C'd to 550MHz and bolted to 256MB of 1500MHz GDDR3. The performance from such a cheap little card was just superb. Probably my favourite card ever. Ran a pair in SLI until one broke and I had to accept a refund because they'd gone out of production. I retired the remaining 7300GT to less demanding duties and replaced it with:

Inno3D GeForce 7900GS 256MB PCI-e
The best overclocker I've ever owned. The GPU on this peach of a card went from 450MHz to 700MHz with noting but a replacement cooler. Retired when I moved to a 24" monitor because 256MB of video ram really isn't enough at 1920x1200.

Sapphire Radeon 4870 512MB PCI-e
This is what I use now. The first card I've never bothered overclocking or tweaking in any way because it's just so ridiculously fast. Max detail and AA on every game I play and it just doesn't care.

 

[MODEL3]

Originally posted by: Arkaign
Heh well, my brother bought the card, I think there were only two games it worked with. $200 was a lot of money back then; heck it still is.

I preferred the Voodoo2 to the TNT, but IMHO the TNT was the first time there was a 3D card that worked well enough in enough popular games at a decent price, to be considered a credible challenger. It also helped that you didn't *need* a 2d card along with the 3d cards any more, although the 2d quality, while fast, was usually a bit muddy on many Nvidia boards for a long time. I remember my Ti200 looking like I was looking at my desktop through a murky aquarium.

I said Carmack because at the time, Carmack in some interviews made very good comments for verite in relation with the then competition.

Although what you said is right way to describe the situation, my personal experience with Nvidia was not so good, so for me, Voodoo was the only solution until Geforce 2 (I didn't like the geforce 256 although it was faster, nor the TNT2 than can do 32bit color)

And the comment about Ti 200 was dead on.

 

[Rubycon]

Originally posted by: Zap


Matrox M3D PCI
It was an add-on 3D accelerator around the time of the original Voodoo. I'm not sure I ever got it to work... or else none of my games supported it. I don't quite remember exactly what I got after this, maybe Voodoo 2 after it came out.

That was based on the NEC PowerVR chip. It was pretty powerful but lacked features needed to compete with other cards at the time. I had the retail package and it was bundled with Ultim@te Race Pro. Loved playing that on my dual Pentium Pro 200 using a Matrox Millennium II 8MB WRAM for 2D. It did not muck up the 2D like the Voodoo passthrough cables did either.

 

[Martimus]

I bought a Voodoo 5500 for around $400 when they came out. While it lasted forever, and seemed to age better than the GeForce 2, it sucked in comparison to the afforementioned card at the time, and cost a lot more to boot.

 

[Martimus]

Originally posted by: Zap
Alright, here are my...

Worst:

Trident 512KB ISA
It was in my first computer and I thought I had it going on... until I found out it didn't support more than 8-bit color (256 colors). I replaced it with a Tseng Labs ET4000 1MB that did "high-color" (15-bit, 32k colors).

Matrox M3D PCI
It was an add-on 3D accelerator around the time of the original Voodoo. I'm not sure I ever got it to work... or else none of my games supported it. I don't quite remember exactly what I got after this, maybe Voodoo 2 after it came out.

S3 Savage 3D 32MB AGP
It was a crappy graphics chip on a crappy board by some nameless overseas sweat shop. Performed pretty poor. I sold it on Ebay for $1, and the fucker who bought it filed a complaint against me saying I sold him a defective card because his old NVIDIA 8MB card outperformed it, and "32MB should outperform 8MB." It was probably in one of my secondary machines and was probably replaced by a Voodoo 3 or GeForce GTS or something.

Gainward "Golden Sample" GeForce FX 5600 Ultra AGP
I thought I had it going on because I managed to score this card - it was the coveted "flip chip" version of the FX 5600 Ultra meaning it ran 50MHz faster and looked totally HOT with red PCB and a red flame/fireball shaped heatsink. Well, it still wasn't fast enough, plus the fan sounded totally like an FX 5800 Ultra, if'n ya know what I mean.

ATI Radeon 9600 XT AGP
I was building a killer overclocked Athlon setup using an Nforce 2 chipset motherboard and got this from a friend through a trade. Alas, the card did NOT work on that Nforce 2 board, though it worked fine on VIA/Intel chipset boards and other cards (including other Radeons) worked fine on that Nforce 2 board.

MSI GeForce FX 5900 XT AGP
I actually liked this card, so why is it on my "worst" list? Well, MSI sent out totally cherry cards to review sites. I can't quite prove it beyond the fact that the review cards had faster memory on it than the retailing cards, but my experience was that probably without fail the reviewers all got completely awesome overclocks on it. Between my friends and I, we had probably three of these cards. None of them would overclock enough to be worth the trouble.

PNY GeForce 6600 GT PCI Express
The card itself was pretty average. Why I list it on my "worst" list is because it was hands down the worst rebate experience I have experienced, and I still didn't get the $40 that PNY owes me.

Gigabyte Radeon HD 2600 Pro PCI Express
I bought this for my HTPC because I wanted something quiet (whole card covered by one gigantic passive heatsink) and I figured I would play some games on my (at the time) new 42" 1080p screen. Well, not only was the performance pretty lame, the thing overheats within minutes during gaming. Unfortunately I still have it in my HTPC, a few years later. It still overheats and locks up.

Various Sapphire Radeon X800 series (X800XL, X800XT, etc.)
At one time a few years ago I bought a number of these cards and had a really high failure rate, probably 50% or so. They also hassled on an RMA.

XFX GeForce 8600 GTS PCI Express
This was an RMA replacement for a 7900 GT. While performance was close, I still think I got the shorter end of the stick. Also, XFX sent out an oddball card. They've removed it from their site, but at the time they claimed that this "special" 8600 GTS was the only one in the whole world that had a 256-bit memory interface, and because of this required a special PCIe power adapter that fed +5v in the middle between the two +12v wires of an otherwise normal 6-pin PCIe power plug. First, the 256-bit thing was an outright lie. Second, the 6-pin power plug was keyed exactly the same as a normal PCIe power plug, but plugging in a normal one would cause the card to not put out a picture. You absolutely HAD to use their provided adapter. See the manufacturer response (search for "rundausaurus") under the Newegg reviews for this card. Newegg's description originally also said 256-bit, but was retroactively edited after they sold a bunch.

Of course the opposite of the worst is the...

Best:

Tseng Labs ET4000 1MB ISA
Two things about this card. First was that it was my first upgrade, and I thougth I actually saw a performance difference... until I saw my system run Wing Commander next to my roommates system with a Trident card (albeit a crippled one with 256k on an 8-bit ISA bus versus mine on 16-bit). Mine was pretty much in real time while my roommate's was in slow motion. This was my first introduction to upgrading and performance differences. The second thing about this card was that it supported "high-color." I actually was able to see a difference between JPG and GIF files. OMG, the amount of time I spent in abpe* (for those that know usenet). :laugh:

Tseng Labs ET4000W32 VLB
Another jump in performance. Wow! It is like going from PCI to PCIe. It was my first "Windows Accelerator" and was in the first computer I built from scratch.

Tseng Labs ET6000 PCI
A solid evolution to PCI. It was as fast and much cheaper compared to much more expensive cards such as the Matrox Millenium. I still have two of these cards to this date. Too bad Tseng Labs never made the transition to accelerating 3D.

Matrox G200 AGP
While some hate this card, I liked it enough. I think for around 2 weeks (which is right when I bought it) it was the fastest 3D card that money can buy. Seriously, 2 weeks! It worked well enough with Windows games, but the problem was that people at the time were still playing stuff like Quake 2 and the DOS OpenGL wrapper was nearly stillborn. Why I liked this card is that it taught me how to overclock and tweak things other than the CPU. Basically Quake 3 happened, and I found out I was running a blazing 14FPS on my G200. I found some tweaking program for the G200 that allowed me to clock up the G200 chip as well as memory, plus tweak a number of latency settings in the card. I must have had a good card and decent cooling because I didn't know what I was doing so I just pretty much maxed out everything, and it worked! I pretty much doubled my Quake 3 framerate by running this program and sticking a fan on the tiny heatsink.

Voodoo 3 2000 PCI
At the time I was running a Pentium III 550 Coppermine in an Asus BX chipset board and had the FSB overclocked to the BIOS max of 150MHz. This resulted in an 825MHz CPU and unfortunately a 150MHz SDRAM clock and 100MHz AGP clock. I was able to find some RAM that worked at 150MHz (some Kingston PC100 CAS 2 stuff that was magic). I was unable to find an AGP card at the time that would tolerate the 100MHz bus speed (default 66MHz). My solution? A PCI Voodoo 3. PCI bus was overclocked to 37.5MHz but the card worked fine, and with a spare heatsink frag-taped to the back of the card I was able to overclock it to pretty much Voodoo 3 3500 levels. This card rocked in Quake 3 (what I was still playing at the time).

Connect3D Radeon X800 GTO PCI express
My first successful experience with unlocking disabled parts of cores. I had played around with GeForce 6800 LE but the one I owned definately had faulty disabled pipes. This X800 GTO was unlocked and rocked! It also was a solid card, unlike most of the Sapphire cards I bought around that time.

ECS GeForce 8800 GT PCI Express
I decided I wanted a quieter machine while I was working towards my Masters degree. This 8800 GT was factory overclocked by 50MHz and came with an Arctic Cooling Accelero S1 pre-installed. Basically, yes, I can have performance as well as quiet. It was kind of a "proof of concept" eye opener for me.

BFG GeForce GTX 285 PCI Express
This is what I currently use. Why do I call it "best?" Because it is! Besides sometimes using better components, BFG also bins cards for various factory overclocks. My card is air-cooled, but was pulled from the liquid cooled bins which are higher clock. Not only that, I personally had asked one of the guys doing the binning to push a bunch of passed cards harder. I took his top 10 cards and personally tested them, and purchased the best one. Thus, I literally have the ONE best card out of thousands.

I loved the Tseng Labs cards. Cheap, yet very solid, and in the case of the ET6000 it was actually much better than its competition.

 

[Bryf50]

Worst

Fx5200
Just didn't know any better at the time. Saw 128mb and thought it was better then my 64mb geforce 2 gts that came with the computer. I wonder if it actually performed worse then the geforce 2 gts.

Best

6600gt
First capable graphics card that got me started with PC gaming. Handled everything I needed it to.

x1800xt
Got this card after the x1900s came out for extremely cheap. Performed as good or better then the popular and more expensive 7900gt.

8800gt
Got it right when they came out in 2007. Still handled nearly every game well at highest settings until I upgraded just a few weeks ago to a 4890.

 

[Zap]

Originally posted by: nitromullet

Originally posted by: Zap
BFG GeForce GTX 285 PCI Express
This is what I currently use. Why do I call it "best?" Because it is! ... I literally have the ONE best card out of thousands.

So, what are your clocks on this magical GTX 285?

I have the H2OC BIOS on it, so clocks are 729 core, 1674 shader and 2780 memory. This is in a closed case (Lian Li Lancool variant) with the fan set to AUTO. With fan manually cranked up a bit, I've gotten in the mid-upper 700 range for core, mid 1700 shader and just over 2800 memory. It can probably do even better if actually liquid cooled since these respond well to lower temperatures. This reviewer with liquid cooling got 783MHz core and 1844MHz shaders on a similar binned card.

 

[Elganja]

Canopus Pure3D 2

 

[sisq0kidd]

I'm gonna get crap for this, but... my current Powercolor 4850.

What is it with this card? This thing puts out heat like nothing I've ever had before. The stock heatsink is a joke. Are you listening Powercolor/ATI? This is an unfinished product. If they would have slapped something on with a better heatsink like the HIS series, it would be a great card.

 

[RedFiveSW]

Originally posted by: MagickMan
My biggest regret was buying a Matrox Millennium G200, horrid OpenGL support. Luckily, I rectified this by getting a 12MB Voodoo2 soon after (and then a 2nd Voodoo2 a couple months later). My 300a@464MHz with Voodoo2 SLI was a beast of a machine.

I also hated my 9800Pro, it was a steaming pile of crap with terrible drivers. I haven't bought another ATi product since.

I'm using a 9800 pro right now