Hardware The Hardware Hall of Fame

I loved my 9800! I also had a dual opteron as my main gaming rig for a bit, and now its my rock solid server.

 

i had one of the x800xtpe at launch and it was a fantastic card too at the time and the fact that it was so hard to get hold of made it the king of lan partys

 

8800GTX owner here too (BFG OC2 - Almost as fast as the Ultra and over £100 cheaper). Added a second one in march this year for £100 with an Accellero Xtreme already attached so I an play all the latest games maxed @ 1680 x 1050.
What about the Freezer 7 Pro, or Tuniq Tower 120 for the hall of fame? They both proved you didn't have to be a plumber to get big stable overclocks.

 

I had a Club3D 9800 Pro =D The 256MB/256bit interface. It was king of the hill, only got replaced by a 6800XT because "she" died and my clumsy brother almost completely torn off one capacitor which he fixed with ordinary tape to secure it in place.

I think the AMD Athlon XP 2500+ Barthon should be up in there too (guilty for having one) that cpu Oc'ed in a blink of an eye and really well and it's still running now at default as a "second" pc. My first AMD/ATI Combo =') very fond memories of it.

Had an Intellimouse too but it was trackball (yey!), got replaced cause it died. OMG I keep having hardware dying on me! ROFL

 

Unfortunately, the Lian-Li V-1000 probably deserves a place in the hut of shame for horrifically bad timing - flipping the motherboard upside-down right as nForce 4 started burning its way through heatpipe chipset coolers makes for quite the fail.

(I'd still rather have a V-1000 than a TJ07, though)

 

Here's some hardware I'd like to see added:

Athlon 'Thunderbird' Chips. Really, for me this was the first time I had ever been completely blown away by the performance of a piece of hardware. The OC ability was great too.

The XP chips and the first Athlon 64's, all massive points in the history of Hardware. AMD really was a long way ahead of Intel at one time..

The original Scythe coolers were fantastic too.

There are so many pieces of hardware that could be added here, you have some good choices, but there are plenty more to be added already

 

i was 100% sure that the 8800GTX was here
that thing was a beast ..... a damn furnace too
that thing would chew and spit out anything u gave it
i remember loading up crysis with full of confidence at 2560x1600
and almost nothing loaded i had like 0.1 fps
after that i lost confidence in everything xD

 

I remember buying the original microsoft optical mouse explorer. the 5 button one that was like 70 bucks back in the day. Worth every penny, I blue LED modded it and used it till it broke.

Didn't own much else on the list, but remember the 9800 pro and meeting the dev's at a lan party and they were handing them out like candy.

Really I would like to add all of SLI and x-fire to the hut of fail. Hot, expensive, and offers marginal performance increase. Might as well upgrade to a better single card then ever go SLI.

 

FBDimms for hut of fail.

 

Nobody here will have heard of this piece of gear, but the only hardware item I've ever owned which really just didn't work was a Matrox RT2000 video editing card. This thing offered two major selling points: firewire ports, back in the days when they were exotic, and the ability to plug it, SLI style, into a G400 graphics card and do 3D effects on the video. The thing cost nearly £1000 including the modified G400 and really only worked properly if you had exactly the right hardware behind it. It constantly dropped long-running recordings halfway through, locked up, and refused outright to support a huge range of firewire-equipped video cameras. An absolute waste of time.

 

I can still remember the original review of the Opty in CpC and it was that article that got me into overclocking

 

I think id add the AMD mobile 2500+, Back in the day it was an amazing chip!! Ive still got 1 its not in use but still works

 

8800 GTS 512 not far behind.
Not to be confused with the 320 and 640 versions ( rubbish )

 

Basically Matrox was a fail.

Add the 2900XT to the fail list, aside from costing quite a bit, it was a furnace and literally died when even a measly 2xAA was enabled.

Here's a few things that came to mind for fail and fame:

Fail: Pentium 4, for all the money you paid, you got garbage.
Fame: DFI's NF4 boards and Abit P35 board
Fail: Crossfire(original), you needed dongles and prayers for it to work
Fame: H-IPS technology, for making LCD displays bearable and S-IPS even better.
Fail: Silverstone Raven, for such a good idea, terrible execution
Fame: RV700(HD48xx) for making a complete 180 turn on the market after 1 1/2 years of ass-whooping by Nvidia
Fail: GTX260 192SP: Terrible performance and cost an arm, although somewhat redeemed by the 216 version.
Fame: Vapor-X Coolers; forever changing the GPU cooling systems and saving our ears from the Reference ATi coolers.
Fail: TSMC, for years they have failed to actually produce enough chips for GPUs.

Quite a list eh?

 

the discontinued E6600 was well ahead of it's time too.. it was breaking 4ghz way back

 

A note for the 8800gtx for saving me money! Rig still playing all games well and will perhaps upgrade when Dx9 games are not the commonplace anymore!

 

Any chance of adding in Overclocking competitions as fail for next year? None of those things actually made a difference.

Oh and add in the Nforce 7 boards as fail since the NB would melt. Or was that the NF6?

 

QFT

 

lol yeah the 680i would eat up memory too- had voltage spike problems when you went over 2.1v.. the mosfets would burn up- you pop off the sinks and see alot of times the sinks weren't even touching XD

the nb and mcp runs hot with the stock sinks.. pretty much a mess unless you knew about this ahead of time- not a bad chipset if you fixed the problems and stepped around the issues with auto voltages (it could not do auto anything like intel chipsets)

 

Well it was the only SLI medium, and was made by EVGA(the XFX version was garbage imo) and Asus.

Guess the QC was asleep that year.