My 8800 GTX did amazingly well. I still have it for sentimental reasons although its perfectly functional. I thought the GTX 460 was excellent value as well. I had an ATI X800GT for many a moon and it never let me down. The 8800 GTX still wins though.
For me it has to be the radeon 9500 non pro (with the right pcb) flashed to 9700pro nvidia 8800gt or gtx 460.
I agree, the 8800GT and GTX460 were amazing cards, a mate of mine bought the 8800GTX on release and had it until 3 months ago. Fantastic card.
My 4850 is still doing well. It struggles on new games, especially since my screen res is 1920x1200. But console port games play fine at high or medium settings. I slapped an Accelero S1 cooler on it and its been running with a 500rpm 120mm fan on ever since, doing just fine. I'll be sad to let her go, but her time will be up once the more affordable 7xxx series cards come out. Still, been with me through 3 CPU upgrades, 3 motherboards, 2 OS's and a case change. I still am using my Enermax power supply i purchased at the same time as well, i got good value out of that day of shopping!
For me, 8800GTS 640. 5 year old card, I've had mine for about 4 years. It died about 5 months ago, I stuck it in the oven and fixed it. It's been working since. Obviously I need an upgrade before I can do Skyrim or BF3 etc, but still, 5 year old card and it's damn respectable for it.
I'm tossing in another vote for the 8800GT. I've had one in use off and on in a variety of systems ever since buying it soon after release. In fact, it's currently in use along side my 5870! Which is another fine card, but not aged enough to really see if it lasts the long haul.
Because their price was driven down hugely later in their lives, making them great values. Also, declaring an entire article terrible because of two (in your opinion) poor choices is not very sensible.
8800GT, HD4850 and the HD6850 were pretty good choices. I would've included the 8800GTS 640, that thing was quite a decent value as well. And the 9800 Cards were a no brainer.
Oh also, I cast my vote for the GTX 460. Mine handles 1920x1200 gaming at high settings on modern games while slightly underclocked due to a semi-broken fan (my fault, changing a case fan while the power was on, don't know what I was thinking. One stray finger and bam! 9 blade fan with a missing blade.). Anyways, solid value.
I was using my 9800GT (~8800GT) until it died on me a few weeks after upgrading to my sig rig. would have replaced it with a warranty replacement if BFG hadn't gone under... on a side note; I just finished building a HTPC out of spare parts, old mobo didn't have integrated GPU, so I grabbed the newest card I had available: a GeForce 6800GT. Works just as good as the day I bought it.
I bought the non-GT 6600 and damn was I pissed... Come to think of it, that's the last card I've actually bought.
When I was tasked with building computers for a couple of friends, I specced one with an 8800 GT and the other with a 9800 GTX. Both of them were very satisfied with my work and still have the same cards to this date! As for me, I love my 560 Ti. Not exactly a "budget" card, but considering I bought it for £180 just after launch it's great!
Another 8800gt lover here. Got 150mhz overclocks above stock speed from both memory and core with mine and it now does an admirable job powering my sisters skyrim gaming sessions.
