Your very own first Video Card, post here!

[bruce0916]

MX400 (AGP)
ATI Radeon8500 (AGP)
6600GT (PCIE)
ATI1950pro (PCIE)
EN9800GT TOP -> GTS250 (upgraded by vendor)
HD5770

All update purposes are for gaming..

 

[Ancalagon44]

Started with a Riva TNT 16meg - was never really very impressed with what it did. Never felt "fast", although things looked a lot better with hardware acceleration. Does anyone else fondly the remember the transition from software rendering to hardware rendering?

Then, Geforce 256. Got this with a new computer, an Athlon 700. Both were cutting edge tech at the time, thinking back I'm amazed my mother agreed to buy the machine. And I got a 17inch CRT, which was enormous at the time. That was probably when I enjoyed gaming most actually.

My next machine, built mostly by me, came with a Radeon 9200 (non pro). Not a bad card I suppose, did what it needed to do, ran Counter Strike Source and Half Life 2 well enough, didnt cope very well with Doom 3. I later upgraded it to a 9600XT, which was a lot faster but perhaps not as big a difference as I would have liked. That PC travelled the few hundred mile trip from home to university and back again a few times, then nearly 4 years after it was built, was moved to London, where it still is today. And working... in a fashion. Its graphics card doesnt seem to work properly anymore - crashes after a few minutes even in Diablo II. But otherwise the PC is going strong, 7 years later.

Next PC, the first PC I built with my own hard earned cash, had a Geforce 8800GTS 640. Probably the best card I've ever owned. I mean, it lasted for 3 years, and still ran brand new games perfectly, including Dead Space and Race Driver GRID. Yeah it didnt score top marks in Crysis, but then nothing did, and it could at least run it in high resolution (1680x1050) on medium-high detail.

Newest card is a Club 3D 5770 overclocked edition. I'm amazed by physically small the card is compared to my 8800 GTS! But it does seem pretty fast, handled Crysis a lot better than my old card. Probably wont upgrade for the next few years.

 

[IcePickFreak]

First was a Diamond Monster 3D, I still remember it because it's when gfx cards first came around.

Then I had a Riva 128 for a short bit.

Then I moved up to 2 Diamond Righteous 3D cards (Voodoo2) in SLI (still my only foray into SLI gfx). I actually have at least one of those cards around here somewhere as I came across it last year when reorganizing my pile of old junk I refuse to throw away.

It gets a bit blurry after that, but had a Riva TNT, a Riva TNT2, Ti4200, 5200FX (Still have this one as well, it's like a curse) and... well, after that last one I can't go on.

 

[ramj70]

S3 virge in my packard hell computer
Matrox Millemium II (dell computer)
Riva TNT 2 (gateway computer)
GeForce 3 Ti500 (alienware computer)
GeForce 4 Ti4600 (ibuypower computer)
Leadtech 6800GT (my first build)

PCIe

evga 8800GTS 320MB
evga 8800GT 512MB superclocked version (single slot cooler did not work well, card heated up quite a bit, causing artifacts and lock ups)
evga 8800GTS 512mb G92 (used evga step up to replace the overheating 8800GT)
gigabyte GTX 275 1792mb

 

[McWatt]

Tseng Labs ET1000, and I'm only 29!

Then an ET4000, Matrox Millenium, Voodoo 1, Riva TNT, Riva TNT2, GeForce 256, GeForce 2, Radeon 9700, GF6800GT, 7900GT, Radeon 4870 512 (which disappointed me on day one by still not having the memory to load even a medium detail texture pack for Oblivion without a little hickup and disk thrashing every half minute, but otherwise has been great).

The 9700 and 6800GT both died hardware death. The 6800GT's fan got clogged with dust and stopped turning, while the 9700 just died despite good cooling.

The best improvement from one generation to the next was definitely from the Millenium to the Voodoo. The original GeForce probably takes second place there, and the 4870 third.

 

[potato28]

Well, my first PC had a MX440 in it, but at that time I really didn't know anything about PC's. I just played and enjoyed my slideshow cs 1.6 performance. But the first GPU I picked out and installed myself was a 6600GT. That 6600GT is still running prefectly fine, OCed it and overheated it many many times.

 

[WT]

I think it was called a STB Velocity 128 4mb.

Ahh, same !! Bought it when I couldn't afford a 3dfx. Ended up buying a number of 3dfx cards after my Quake years, but at that point there was no reason to buy them. The Banshee was their first failure, but I would still love to have a V5 6000 to frame and hang on the wall.

 

[AshPhoenix]

It was an S3 with 8MB memory.

 

[QuantumPion]

Matrox something. Then a Voodoo1->voodoo2->voodoo3->geforce->geforce2 ultra->geforce 4200 ti->geforce 5900->geforce 6800gt->geforce 7900gt->geforce 8800gtx->geforce 285gtx.

 

[SHAQ]

Some card put out by DFI in the early 90's. I still have it in the basement with the manual. It would have had very little memory on it. First video card I bought recently was a 5900 at Fry's. I exchanged the 5700 ultra for it. I thought the 5700 ultra was faster than the 5900 why else call it ultra? lol I had been out of the loop for several years.

 

[Dead3ye]

I couldn't possibly list all the cards I had in between these two (has to be at least 10):

Sierra Screamin' 3D (Rendition V1000)
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Saphire HD4890

 

[Qbah]

A 2MB S3 Vision968. It was an awesome card - most people around had 512kB cards. I could run 1024x768 (or was it 800x600? ) on my monitor - everyone else had crappy 640x480 monitors That was a BEAST! That card was screaming! Then a few years later I added a 3DFx card and holy sh!t When I saw bi- and trilinear filtering I was blown away (in Tomb Raider 1). No more huge pixels on the screen - everything was blurred and looked amazing! I don't think I was ever "wowed" again in a similar manner... Though Quake 1 with everything in 3D also made me go "wow" AA in Quake2 was amazing too... And that's it. Nothing more really made me go O_O since then, I guess... Okay, Crysis maxed

The Tseng cards were awesome too, I remember. Fun times

Had an Amiga 500 before that... a C64 before the Amiga