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.