Graphics Your best and worst graphic card purchase.

So wondering what people best GPU [not in performance, but value/deals/longevity] and worse.

My best, my current GTX 1080, purchased it on ebay used with EVGA warranty for £400 just before the mining craze in march 2017 and nvidia announcing they wont be bringing anything new out in 2017, which made the prices shoot up almost x2.

likely to keep it another year at least due to the current pricing new cards so should be my longest serving card to.

My worse by far was my pre order of the 9800 GX2.
i was at college at the time and was living off £30 pw, saved hard for a new GPU.
Think this thing was like £400 or something, i felt sick as soon as the payment went though with regret. That was a serious amount of money for me when i was 18.
It came and the card was crap, only Crysis would use both cores on the card, and the performance was way off what i was hoping. Lucky Ebuyer agreed to return it and refund!
Ended up getting a standard 9800, which did fine for a while but did die (my only GPU to ever do that)

Other honorable mentions are the R9 280x, (thats now in my mates PC used everyday) and the GTX 970 was awesome value. How times have changed.

 

My current 970 has probably been my best card.

Not sure I ever bought a real lemon to be honest, running 2 7600GT's in SLi was probably my worst buy, did the same for the 8800GT, ran them in SLi without any issues but would have been better off with a single, more expensive card solution.

 

Tough one. I would say, at a push, my Voodoo 5500 PCI which I snagged for £99 in a clearout sale at PCworld. Epic card for the cash. Then again, my 5900 Ultra was bought in a pricing error for $140 (out in the U.S) and also performed beautifully. Honorable mention (yes I am cheating) 3Dlabs Oxygen 32mb.

Worst - GTX 280. Cooked itself after 11 months.

 

Best: Gainward Geforce 5900 Golden Sample. I nearly went for a Radeon 9800 after the travesty of a card that the 5800U was, but stuck with Nvidia. Ended up that this was a bit of a hero card - BIOS modded to 5950U, vGPU modded, made up an enormous heatsink (from a CPU cooler) and it overclocked like a monster. I subsequently acquired both a 9800 Pro and 9800XT and this easily beat out both of them.

Worst: Videologic Apocalypse 3Dx. Not because this was a bad card, but because I bought it as a 13 year old with what seemed like a year's worth of pocket money. My research was magazine based, and at the time all of the noise was about PowerVR vs 3Dfx. Post research I decided that PowerVR was the one for me for the new family PC. This was a poor purchase not because I should have gotten the 3Dfx alternative, but because I shouldn't have gotten either. I didn't realise until a bit down the line that aforementioned family PC was packing a Riva128 (dad took a "tick all the boxes" approach with Dell) which ate either of them for breakfast with the added bonus of working with pretty much every game, and I could have saved all that precious pocket money.

 

Best: Radeon 9800 SE unlocked to full featured, complete with watercooling and hefty OC it ate much dearer GPUs for breakfast.

Worst: Geforce 8800 GTS, That was an awesome GPU you say? Sure, unless like me you bought it shortly before the massively superior 2nd Gen 8800 GTS came out.

 

Best: Probably my reference GTX 670 - it was such a good card when watercooled, and the PCB was so small it was crazy cute.

Worst: Rage Fury Maxx - what a piece of sh!t. Didn't even pause to think about it - this card wins that prize hands down.

 

Was that a first gen AIW with the Rage II+ chipset?
I would list my ATI All-In-Wonder Radeon (7200) as my best. The first video card I bought for myself. I loved playing with the video capture. The card also served me well for several years ran my CRT at 1600x1200 @ 70Hz (maybe 65Hz I don't remember). I could push it higher (at 60Hz) but the text and icons were getting pretty small, even for my young eyes.
Not sure what I'd list as worst, I never purchased a high end card since, and I have never excepted too much out of my cards.

Closely related, my biggest disappointment was the purchase of a Hauppauge WinTV HVR-1600. Revision 1 of the card used a Linux compatible tuner chipset. Revision 2, what I received, used a newer unsupported chipset. The card worked fine in Windows but I wanted to use it with Linux. What really annoyed me was there was no way to know which version one would receive without physical inspection of the card. I do miss my MythTV one of the best PVRs I ever used.

 

I got a GeForce 4 4800SE 128MB agp for 50€ at the time. It ran GTA:SA dialed up on my fancy 5:4 15" TFT.
Worst was the GPU on my first laptop, some low budget Acer. It had an ATI that ATI dropped driver support within the first 3~6 months.

 

Best, probably my 4870x2 - I loved that beast.

Worst, probably my GTX570 - don't get me wrong it was/is (still got it #hoarder) a good card I just bought it towards the end of the 5 series life and the VRAM level was always pushed.

Hoping my next best card will be AMD so I can try out my Freesync though although still very happy with my 1080.

 

Worst was a HIS IceQ card, I think it was an ATI 4670. The issue wasn't anything to do with the power of the card, it was that the IceQ cooler was such a faulty piece of garbage that after a year of use started actually breaking apart.

Best is probably my current MSI 1070 GamingX, the cooling on it is doing really well at keeping the card happy with everything I throw at it (fans often don't need to spin faster than 40% under load as well) and my GPU is doing a nice job of powering my 3440x1440 resolution with a decent average fps in everything I've been playing.

 

Best: either current GTX 970 or the 8800GTX. Both last(ing/ed) a long time before I felt the need to upgrade. The 8800GTX was bought second hand a little over £200 about a year after its release, sold for £90 many years later. 970 bought for £220 the black Friday after its release, 4 years on it's still a reasonable card and a hair faster 1060 is still asking similar price.

Worst: X800GTO, X1650pro (IIRC) and 5870 (aka all of my ATI/AMD purchases). Both x era cards were just before 8800GTX purchase, X800 couldn't do something to play Oblivion properly, so I bought X1650, which resulted in almost no performance improvement, still had to use Oldblivion. Worst value was upgrading from GTX260 to 5870, though had a good performance increase, the card's residue value was completely gone overnight when AMD decided to name 6870 the mid-range.

As you can see, I've had bad experience with AMD, and only good experience with NVidia. Safe to say which brand my next card is likely to be.

 

I'm the opposite...
My best was definitely my ATI 9700, had an Arctic Cooler on it and overclocked nicely, and ran games it long after it probably shouldn't have. I wept when I eventually sold it.
Worst, I could go back to my old #9 card, which was okay for the time, but then I spent money on doubling the memory to 2MB! Didn't make any difference to anything. Probably my worst actual card was the geforce 440mx (I think), it was so cut down that most things ran like terribly, and I'm pretty sure I had to re-install the drivers a lot more than is sensible.

 

Best:- Palit GTX 1070
Worst- The card I have now, Sapphire RX560 2GB (Underpowered POS)

 

My best buy was a MSI 8800GT with a pretty cooler (think it may have been a "ZILENT" model?). It was decently fast but was really, really quiet and cool and ran like a champ for many, many years.

Worst card was the one immediately preceding the above: it was an emergency stop-gap card at a time when I had zero spare cash. A GeForce 6200 (with Turbo Cache, no less). I think my toaster probably had more rendering grunt

 

Oh I forgot about that, wasn't that an AGP? The trauma must have blocked it from my memory.

I think there's an X800 in my socket 939 system that lives in the loft pc graveyard too...

 

Best - GTX 280, took years of overclocking and abuse.

Worst - GTX 560ti... had 4 of them in just over 12 months... in the end Scan gave up replacing them and sent me a 570 instead.

 

Nah, was PCIE iirc. I actually think I still have it lying around (in box) somewhere, waiting for the day when dire old GPUs become collectors items