Edit: This was supposed to be a poll but I took more than 5 minutes to add it so it wouldn't let me

Whatcha guys think? I was outta the gaming / hardware / computer loop for like 3-4 years so I never got to experience nor remember the whole middle chunk. I've only had three discrete cards in my life -- a TNT2 (which came w/ my 1999(?) 800Mhz Pentium III HP Pavilion), a Radeon 9700 Pro (which replaced the TNT2, but which I, being a stupid little kid, didn't check for measurements and so I had to leave the case open for it to fit. Plus I think the HP PSU couldn't handle it but who knows), and an 8500GT in my current HP Slimline (which is getting replaced tomorrow w/ a HD 4550). So I've never really gotten to experience "high-end" except w/ the 9700 Pro which was massively bottlenecked by the Pentium III and never used to its full potential

Share / reminisce about your experiences!

The ones at the crossing point between "Too powerful to run old things properly" and "Not powerful enough to much with"
So around 2000-2002.

I started out with an ATI Radeon 7000 and a 7200. I had my first overclocking experience with the 7000. Let's just say it didn't end too well.

I moved on to the 9600XT and the 9800; both served me very well. I eventually traded the 9800 for an NVIDIA 6800 GT, which was my first NVIDIA experience.

I took a brief hiatus from ATI with the purchase of a MBP with the 8600M GT.

When I built my current gaming PC, I decided on the ATI 4870; it has probably been one of my best decisions on computer hardware.

For AGP cards, you can never go wrong with an ATI 9800 Pro or an Nvidia 7600 GS

I've had a GeForce 2, x300 and 2400pro.

All have been meh for their time.

voodoo. voodoo2. 3dfx. glide. Good times.

Oooh, I remember having a Voodoo Banshee card, and it was sweet.

I rarely ever had the best, I was always a best value type of person. Although I am buying more in the higher end lately. The nice thing is I enjoy working with various computer hardware, I will eventually fill in the gaps in my video/cpu experiences.

Here's the 3d cards I've had installed in my primary computers over the years.

S3 Virge-> Rendition 2100 -> 3dfx Banshee -> 3dfx Voodoo3 -> Geforce2 MX -> Geforce3 TI-200 -> Radeon 9550 ->Geforce 7800GT -> Radeon 4580 -> Geforce GTX260

Yep. I remember getting a 4mb Diamond Monster3D Voodoo pass-through card. It more than doubled my framerate in JK!

The first graphics card I bought was a Voodoo3 16mb PCI card.. running JK with hardware acceleration for the first time was sweet!!

I had a sweet ISA Diamond Speedstar card (can't remember the exact model, it's been so long) that came with 1 MB of VRAM, but could be upgraded to 2! Needless to say, this was before the days of 3D cards.

S3 Virge-> 3dfx Banshee -> Geforce3 TI-200 -> Geforce 7950GT

That is more-or-less my route. I'm pretty sure I'm leaving out a card or two somewhere, but I've using the 7950 currently.

Just curious, what sort of signs of it not being able to handle the video card did you get? As far as I know it's mostly random reboots/shutdowns and crashes with underpowered systems.

haha, I remember buying a Voodoo2 and being all ZOMG at the graphics in the X-Wing Alliance demo.

voodoo2 -> voodoo3 -> tnt2 -> geforce 2 -> geforce 5200 -> geforce 6600gt -> 2x geforce 7800gtx

then i stopped using desktops and it went

gma945 -> 8600m gt

ah... yes... the video cards

ATI Rage Pro Turbo AGP integrated with a whole 4MB of dedicated memory overclocked to 95MHz ran JK faster than my....

3Dfx Voodoo 2 12MB... ran most games faster than the rage pro turbo and had features the ATI "card" didn't also had a problem with random pink dots all over textures that only went away if i underclocked the card slightly

next computer had some integrated Intel thing.. it was slow, shared memory like most integrated crap, and very feature limited... later upgraded to...

eVGA GeForce 4 MX440SE PCI 64MB (no AGP slot) basically just a glorified GF2 but it did well enough next computer had a...

integrated VIA thing... never used it because when i got the computer i also bought an...

ATI Radeon 9800Pro 128MB... i loved this card up to the day i replaced it and i'm sure whoever i sold it to is also loving it ATI sure was at the top of their game when they made that one... upgraded to...

eVGA GeForce 7800GS... at the time it was the best AGP card available i got the "CO" model which is overclocked to 430/1300 (instead of 375/1200) for a while i had it overclocked to 495/1420 with only a slight increase in temperature (stock cooling on this card is quite good) but at the moment it's at the factory speed

I absolutely adored my GeForce Ti200. Every review said you could overclock it to a Ti500's speed without it blowing up, so I did. That was t3h awesome. First time I had a card with a fan on it.

I don't think I had any signs but the stock HP PSU was crap and the Radeon 9700 Pro was power-hungry

Maybe I was just lucky <_<

I seem to recall the GeForce 3 making a number of significant advances and lasting quite a while on the market. Also the original GeForce 256.

I've had a ATI Rage Fury, an ATI 9800 Pro, A GeForce 4, a GeForce 8600 GT and currently running an ATI 4870 HD. Right now, my best experiences where the 9800 Pro and my current card.

I've had:

3Dfx

• Voodoo Graphics (Canopus Pure3D)
• Voodoo 2

ATI

• 3D Rage Pro
• Rage Fury
• Mobility Radeon 9800
• Radeon X800 Pro VIVO
• Radeon X300
• Radeon X1800 XL
• Mobility FireGL V5700

NVIDIA

• GeForce 256 (DDR)
• GeForce4 Ti4600
• GeForce 8800 GTX
• GeForce 8800 GT

My favorite generation would have to be the 9000-series Radeons. The Mobility Radeon 9700/9800 was based on the X800, so I never actually owned one of these. The Radeon 9700 Pro kicked off DirectX 9 in a huge way and was the beginning of the end for the fixed-function pipeline. The step up from DirectX 8 to 9 was huge and we're never going to see something like it again.

Edit: For fun, here are the CPUs I've owned:
80386 ?? MHz, Pentium 75 MHz, Pentium MMX 200 MHz, Pentium 2 300 MHz, Pentium 4 3.4 GHz, Core 2 Quad Q6700 2.67 GHz, Core 2 Duo T9400 2.53 GHz, Xeon E5462 2.8 GHz (x2)
Athlon 700 MHz, Athlon XP 2000+ 1.67 GHz, Athlon XP 3200+ 2.2 GHz, Athlon 64 FX-55 (San Diego) 2.6 GHz

Let's see:
Voodoo Banshee->Voodoo 5 5500->GeForce 3 Ti200->GeForce 7800GT->GeForce 7950GT
Also had a Voodoo 2 at some point but I think it was after I already had the Voodoo 5 so it went to a PC that wasn't my main one at the time.


I did the exact same thing, loved that card. As you can see from my history it lasted me quite a while.