Worst Graphics Card Purchases

[CurseTheSky]

Geforce 4 MX420 64MB - I convinced my parents to buy this for a family computer so we could do some gaming. It worked, but I wish I had grabbed a Ti card instead.

FX 5200 128MB - Ok, I actually didn't regret the purchase. I got it decently cheap (thank God), and it allowed me to play Warcraft III with as many opponents on the map as I wanted without the screen freezing. IGP for the loss.

FX 5900 SE (128MB ?) - Big mistake on this one; it was a choice between this and an ATI 9600XT. I chose the nVidia card because I was more familiar with them. For the price, I expected it to be a great card, and I was thoroughly disappointed. This was the last piece of hardware I bought before becoming an "enthusiast" and building my own systems 100%.

X1650 Pro - I bought this for a computer I built for my girlfriend ~2-3 years ago out of parts from my old computer (X2 4200+, 1GB Corsair DDR2 400, A8N-SLI Premium FTW). She showed interest in Doom 3, and I thought getting her into gaming would be great. Unfortunately, I was on an extreme budget, I read a few reviews that make the card sound like it would be on par with a nVidia 6800 (GT perhaps; nVidia was into their 7 series at this point), and I grabbed it when it went on sale. Doom 3 is choppy as hell with any of the settings turned up, and the game just isn't as exciting without the eye candy. I should have spent the extra cash and grabbed an X1950 Pro or 7900 GS.

 

[Modelworks]

I740 without a doubt. Terrible card.

 

[aldamon]

Buying a 64MB GeForce 2 GTS instead of a 32MB model. The extra frame buffer was absolutely useless at the time. Heck, the GTS only gave me an extra resolution over my GeForce256 DDR in Q3A. Probably a poor purchase regardless of the memory but I couldn't resist the hype.

 

[Keitero]

I bought a Rage Fury MAXX back in the day. Need I say more?

 

[nemesismk2]

Originally posted by: Modelworks
I740 without a doubt. Terrible card.

I owned a I740 as well so I know what you mean, the version I had was a 8mb Real3d Starfighter i740 :disgust:

 

[vj8usa]

My second Voodoo2. SLI (scanline interleave, or something along those lines) was fun to mess with, but not worth the money. Worst of all, I realized a few months ago that I left both voodoo2s in my old Compaq when we gave it away - I sort of wanted to hold on to them for old times' sake.

 

[brblx]

but that second voodoo2 let you run at the insane resolution of 1024x768. =O

 

[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.

 

[nemesismk2]

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 had a 9800 Pro and don't remember the drivers being terrible so which drivers/games are you talking about?

 

[evident]

i dont think i ever made a bad gpu purchase, as everytime i've upgraded i normally made my money back on selling the previous generation card. except for the gf4 4200TI which i kept as a backup card and my current 8800GT.

 

[faxon]

EVGA 7900GT Superclocked. card came with bad memory (can you say OMG ARTIFACTS?), RMAed it, card came back worse. EVGAs RMA system at the time didnt allow double RMAs on the same product or cross shipping. ended up having to pinch pennies to get a 6600 just so i could have a video card in my first PCI-E rig, and the 6600 came bad as well. had to wait a year before i could get a new card while dealing with a semi working 6600 (omega drivers fixed the crashing but my system would hang if i windowed a game), and i ended up getting a 2900PRO (was worth the price at the time) for christmas after dealing with that year of gaming hell. i didnt get to enjoy the super awesome gaming speed of my athlon 4000+ until after 65nm core 2 quads were on the market (for like $800) lmao

 

[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!

 

[thilanliyan]

8800GTS 640. I don't regret the performance but I paid CAD$600 for it on launch day. I'll never spend that much again.

 

[akugami]

8800 GTS 640. Awesome performer but much like thilan29 I felt like I paid too much. I paid over $400 USD for it. The problem is that since I bought that card my games playing time has been cut drastically due to starting a family. It's why I vowed never to pay more than about $250'ish for any future video card upgrades. I'll just do without for a generation or two.

 

[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.

nV 5800 ultra - nuff said.. minus the noise it wasn't that bad, was just way overpriced for the performance.

 

[lifeblood]

Another vote for the the Real3d Starfighter i740.

 

[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.

 

[error8]

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 had a trident linear accelerated video card, with 1 mb of vram!!! It could also be extended to 4 mb !
But I don't think Trident ever made a d3d card. They were only for 2d.
That was a fast card anyway, I even played NFS 3 on it.:Q at 320X240 .

Worst card ever for me was the FX 5700 LE ( lame edition ). Even though I was using the phenomenal 1024X768 resolution, the card tended to struggle in the big titles of 2003 and in even older games.
My 6600 GT wasn't all that great too. I remember I had only played DOOM3 on it, with all the bells and whistles, but later on, it started to choke with games like FEAR or COD2. Those 128 mb of vram on it were a bad idea from the beginning.

 

[Fox5]

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

Later drivers seemed to have fixed all the issues except the low picture quality. But by that point I had moved onto a 9700 pro.

6600gt. It wasn't much faster than the 9700 pro, and I didn't keep it long.

9800GTX+. The GTX 260 was way faster for less than an extra $100 (at the time), and the 4850 is a shorter card (so I could have moved it to my HTPC later) or gone crossfire (since crossfire mobos are pretty cheap) at a later date.

8400GS. Bought this for an HTPC I was building for my parents. It was supposed to have composite out, but instead only had svideo so I ended up using an external VGA to composite converter I had laying around. Also, the parents couldn't understand how to use an HTPC or what the point of it was, so I just turned the PC into a new PC for them. The nvidia 7 series integrated graphics in it weren't bad.
Later I moved the 8400gs to my HTPC and bought a 730a (geforce 8200 IGP) hoping to use hybrid sli. Hybrid sli just wouldn't work, and both the 8400gs and the 8200 are horribly slow cards not useful for anything recent. A 780G/780GX/790GX motherboard would have been a much better purchase. Well, I ended up going with a discrete gpu anyway...

Actually, I regret all my nvidia card purchases to some extent. Well, I just got a 1GB GTS 250 for my HTPC, so I don't regret that yet, but a 1GB 4850 would have been a marginally better deal, with a better cooler (external exhaust and quieter) and cheaper.

I also purchased an AGP2x Rage card recently for an old computer. The computer had an AGP 8x slot and the rage wouldn't fit. Then I got a FX5200 AGP to put in it. Works fine, but the computer is so old I legitmately considered picking up a refurbished eeepc for around $100, it would be more power efficient, quieter, and roughly the same level of power. It would lack hard drive space, but the PC is basically an Internet terminal. Only problem is that the eeepc's IGP can't drive high resolution monitors.


And on the flip side, cards I've loved:
Voodoo 3. Ultra cheap ($100 for top of the line performance), overclocked like a mofo once I put a fan on it, supported Glide, and worked well in everything I had. At the time, 16 bit dithered color was a better compromise of performance/quality than 32-bit.
Radeon 9700 Pro. This card was amazing in so many ways. Most expensive card I ever bought ($400, no other card I bought has been over $250) but it was worth it. Overclocked marginally well with an arctic cooling cooler added on. Lasted a long time.
X1950XT 256MB. Insane price/performance for the time. It was outdated almost instantly by the geforce 8 series though.

Cards I'm indifferent on:
X850XT. Faster than the 9700 pro or 6600gt, but I didn't keep it for very long. Expensive. On the plus side, it played everything I threw at it at the time.

 

[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 /

 

[AzN]

I don't think there's been a time I bought a card had bad experience other than my first 3d card. I always do proper research before buying the card.

However I felt underwhelmed buying GTX260 from a 8800gts I had originally. not much of a difference but I knew that buying the GTX260.

The worst case scenario was buying OEM computer from a company that included a Trident 4meg card as 3d card.

 

[jdjbuffalo]

Out of all the graphics card purchases, I've really only had one bad one. It was the Nvidia FX 5600. It would work for 5 - 20 minutes and then everything was unplayable. In almost every game I tried it had terrible tearing and huge triangles all over the screen. I thought it was just a bad card, so I sent it in for warranty replacement. The one I got back had the same issue. After a few months of not being able to play a game, I went out and bought an ATI Radeon 9600xt. That was a great graphics card that lasted several years.

 

[AmdInside]

Rage Fury Max and Radeon All-In-Wonder. The Rage Fury Maxx had the worst drivers imaginable for a graphics card and worst of all, they took forever to release Windows 2000 drivers. The ATI Radeon All-In-Wonder suffered from poor gameplay because of it's very low 32MB of video memory.

 

[nitromullet]

I'd have to say it wasn't a singe card for me, but a whole platform. I picked up one of the first Crossfire compatible motherboards ASUS A8R-MVP (Radeon Xpress 1600), an 1800XT, and an X1800 Crossfire Edition (with the dongle).

http://www.newegg.com/product/...x?Item=N82E16813131584
http://www.newegg.com/Product/...x?Item=N82E16814102624
http://www.newegg.com/Product/...x?Item=N82E16814102655

Don't get me wrong, when this thing worked it was FAST, but between the constant VPU recovers and crappy ULi southbridge it just wasn't quite ready IMO. This board was subsequently replaced by the Asus A8R32-MVP Deluxe, which I understand fixed most of the issues with the previous board. Crossfire has come long way since then.

 

[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.