Graphics Your best and worst graphic card purchase.

Man after my own. RGB belongs on someone's XR3I or a carnival float, not a high performance computer. Function over form every time.

 

But......


Best card(s) have to be the Orchid Righteous Voodoo 2 12MB in SLI!!!! Carmageddon TDR looked glorious in 1024x768. Followed by the ATI 9700 Pro, damn great card.

Worst card(s) had to be the ATI x1900xt in Crossfire.... all I used to play was TF2 and the kill cam used to flicker like mad in CF, and only in CF, and I used to get killed a lot.... pffft

I have the Asus Strix 1080Ti and while it's the fastest card I've owned, I don't look back fondly on the purchase and think... that was a great deal.

 

Its taken me a while to actually think of a card I had regrets about buying. Then it came to me. Diamond Edge with its own sound card bolted into it. It was actually slower than the card I was using before, ATI Mach 64 Pro Turbo. Never has a card been taken out any of my PC's and then sent back to Aria Technology as fast it was delivered.

Best card ? Easy my current GTX 1060 in my Ryzen build

 

Think the worst purchase was a FX5200 ... which was awful and I think I paid £90 all those years ago.

Best bang for buck was the X800 XTPE from some guy on eBay... I remember it was around 2/3 of retail price at the time .. I bit the bullet and it turned out perfectly.

On current times the EVGA 1070 has turned into a sterling purchase ... but then at £419 Aug 2016 ... so it bloody should be.

 

Best #1: ATI Radeon X700 I bought in 2004 so I could upgrade the family computer to be capable of playing Half-life 2. It was my first major jump into PC gaming and Half-life 2 has remained my favorite game to this day.

Best #2: ASUS 6950 2Gb DirectCU II. This card is what allowed me to game with triple monitor eyefinity. I loved it so much. I still smile thinking about how much fun that was to game on.

Best #3: Low-profile Zotac GTX 1050ti. It turned my aging HTPC into something that can do VR decently. It's been a great card for the price and such a huge upgrade from the R7 260X I had in it.

Worst: The pair of 9800gt cards I got so I could do that shiny new SLI thing. I would have been better off getting a faster single card and the 9800gt was little more than a resticker of the 8800. Oh well. I did use them for many years and I put fanless heat syncs on them and moved them to an earlier iteration of my HTPC. So I had fun with them.

 

Powercolor 290 PCS+ on a insane cheap deal before the GPU prices whent loopy about end of 2014.

After a few months kept getting back screens at idle due to some unresolved power management issue.

RMA got a Asus 290X matrix Plat.

You guessed it also did same thing after a few months.

RMA that and got a 480 8GB Matrix Plat, that worked fine

TBF i would have rather the original 290 just work from day one it was a pita having a unstable computer on and off for two years.

Cant fault OCUK RMA though either tbf.

Best is prob still original Voodoo 3 2000, still got it too

 

Best was the EVGA GTX670 Superclock I got for under £300 about 2 weeks after launch. Within 5% of a stock GTX680 with a little OC, ran cool and quiet and was BY FAR the longest serving GPU I ever owned (all the way from 2012 through to 2016!).

Runner up is the GTX 1050Ti Strix. Again, got it for a bargain price (£137) and punched well above it's weight (and power consumption!).

Donkeys include a 9800GX2 that disabled 1 GPU when it got too hot - which it did QUICKLY - and a 6870 with a wonky DVI port that required me to unplug/plug the cable in 2 or 3 times before it would output an image every time I booted it up.