Graphics Your best and worst graphic card purchase.

Best is a toss up between my 5900 Ultra missed to 5950 that I got for free or my 1070 pushing MHW at 4K.

Worst? Possibly my pair of 8800 GTS. Coolers fell apart (Koolance blocks) and wouldn't clock for ass.

 

Best : pair of pascal titans

Worst : none.

 

When I bought my first PC I knew bugger all about graphics cards and just went with the cheapest graphics card option. My first ever upgrade was a 3DFX Voodoo 3 3000 which was a revelation, like going from a 70s Mini firing on 3 to a Golf GTi, in those days. My GTX 1070ti is great but, a tiny step up from it's GTX 970 predecessor compared to that first upgrade. The worst was an AMD/ATI card that died within hours but, I can't remember what model it was.

 

Best: the 780Ti currently in my system. Got it really cheap on ebay earlier this year and it's a fantastic card considering its age.

Worst: Bought an X1950XT from ebay several years ago and when I took the heatsink off, it turned out to be some sort of X1900 knock-off. I was able to identify the chip by the code on the die, and the seller was bitchy because I uncovered his scam - he even tried to prevent my refund going through because I somehow "modified" the card. Terrible experience.

 

not a single card but matrox millenium + voodoo fx sli with a slot based celerons that oced like crazy, was the source of many a all nighters in the 90s i was a zombie during the day slept between 6pm till 8 pm then pld QW/QWtf etc all night.

worst?
Matrox Parhelia no idea why this landed on my door step was freebie i think it may have due bw/game.net merging with some hardware site. was busy time at the time was having a an all nighter playing battlefield 1942 when ai heard a large clunk damn heat sink fell off. prior to that games had issues with the card from black textures to just plain old crashing. up shot is some french dude paid more than retail when i lumped it on ebay

 

Worst - by far was the FX 5800 Ultra. I felt like I really wasted my money as it wasn't as good as a 9700 Pro which had been out for ages. The original Ti series had convinced me to stick with team green (I was young, and 15 years later I wish on a regular basis ATI had never gone to AMD).

Best - I liked the X850XT very much, felt like a real step up from what I had. Also the GTX 460 1GB was a great little card for the price. The gigabyte version in particular. I believe bit gave it a recommended, too.

 

Just before the mining craze picked up I got an RX 480 for £160 new. That was a great deal! However, the Asus Dual cooler was absolute garbage, so loud that I ended up replacing it with an AIO. At least I learned a little bit about the false economy of cheap GPU models.

 

Best: 3dFX Voodoo 2 - just to see Final Fantasy 7 in all its resplendent glory back in '98.

Worst: ATi 5970 Black Edition (dual GPU, single PCB jobbie) - ran hot and loud even in Windows. Could not wait to get rid of that card!!!! I went SLI from that moment onwards.

 

Agreed - I had two of them in SLI at one point and they were great little cards at the time, especially on the second-hand market.

 

So many great cards... so hard to remember.

Worst?? Thinking an ATi 2400 Pro was a good card and spending €100 on it. It was absolute trash and cost me three months of pocket money (I was young back then!) for the poor experience.

 

Worst, would have to be a Sapphire 5870 Vapor-X 1GB - a complete and utter hound of a card.

Fond memories of my XFX 8800GT 512MB Alpha Dog Edition, but my best, that accolade safely goes to my current Zotac 1080Ti Mini - it's sheer lunacy to have produced a 1080Ti in mini form in the first instance (kudos to Zotac for that), I can't wait to drop a waterblock on it to truly unleash the wee monsta

 

Then you and I can finally have a battle, Paul. My 1080 Ti should hopefully be arriving this week.

I'm seriously tempted to grab a Hydro Copper block for it. I will have to wait on that one, though.

 

Best purchase is the Zotac GTX 1080Ti, probably because it's the only graphics card that has lasted me for 16 months, and I haven't needed to upgrade,and don't see the need to for a while.

Worst purchase, the ATI HD5970, and then stupidly enough I bought another for Quad CFX. I had nothing but problems with those cards due to the vbios, so I made a custom vbios which fixed a lot of people's cards too...

 

some cool stories, i miss the old GPU box's with the awful CGI girls on them.

 

And I can't wait to see the pictures of it finally going under water!

 

ATI at least had their mascot Ruby and on many boxes the AIBs stuck to that, on the Nvidia side it was a complete mess of various context free humanoids of either gender since very few wanted to use the Nvidia fairy mascot...

Of course sometimes on the ATI side we still got silly, like the Poundworld Lara Croft on the Sapphire 4870x2.

 

Cheers mate, this particular project has been a long time in the planning and the selection/binning of the components has been pretty stringent (even by my standards) - it doubtless won't be to everyone's taste as there will be an intentional lack of RGB, the principal focus being efficiency/silent running on one hand and sheer grunt on the other (it being a home work station for the Mrs and a toy for me to play with on occasions).

 

Ah... Remember when that was considered expensive for a GPU... [Before someone says 'but inflation' that'd put it at £420-ish]

 

Yeah, but cryptomining...

 

I like it already.