What was the very first video card you ever bought?

Diamond Viper 770 (Still have it)
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Back when Graphics Cards had cool names like Viper , Prophet , Voodoo , Annihilator & Hercules Terminator Beast!

Every once in a while, I'm tempted to buy a 3DFX card on ebay just to remind me of the good old days of PC gaming when graphics cards had cool names and came in really cool looking boxes.
 
It's funny you post that picture, as I recall, the heatsink I eventually attached to the Erazor X was a knockoff of the Thermaltake Blue Orb that looked almost identical to that picture. As I recall, the original heatsink was held on with little spring pins, but I couldn't find one with the pins spaced right to fit in its place, so I just super clued it at the corners of the chip.

The fan on the 4200 I had was held on by nothing more than the sheer desire of wanting to be a fan.

It popped off like it was nothing.
 
Every once in a while, I'm tempted to buy a 3DFX card on ebay just to remind me of the good old days of PC gaming when graphics cards had cool names and came in really cool looking boxes.

Well, the next time you get an itch, I have a couple of Voodoo's ( 2 & 3) lying around, I may decide to sell one of them some day :p
 
Intergraph Reactor or a Matrox Millenium or an ATI Rage II ... I owned all of those at one time or another but I don't remember which was first. Life came at you fast in the PC space back then.
 
I was late to PC gaming. My first true gaming card was a BFG 6800GT.
 
My first computer had a cirrus logic card. All I remember is that it was PCI and 64 bit. The first card I bought was a screaming 3d. Unlike a previous poster I actually liked it.
 
The first video card I ever bought with my own money was a Geforce 4 MX 440. Poor choice on my part but I was 14 haha.
 
It was a Voodoo Banshee if I remember correctly. It's rained quite a bunch since those days...
 
Geforce 2 MX...was very late in the owning a computer game. Mainly consoles before hand. I want to say
Medal of Honor: Allied Assault was my first real PC game.
 
GeForce 2 MX 200 PCI

My dad bought me the game Serious Sam which ran at less than 1 fps on the onboard graphics, it was then that I learned about the existence of graphic cards:p
 
this was the first real card I got when I started to really game on the PC,
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2d a Trident 9440 VLB that i expanded to 2MB in order to play Rise of The Robots, 3d a Matrox M3D with a PowerVR PCX2 chipset inside.
So i have been into video cards for over 20 years :p dang i feel old hahahaha
 
ATI 3dRage Pro IIRC, then a RivaTNT2, a Matrox M3d and a voodoo2 (which I still have somewhere) and a voodoo banshee. Also had an intel i740 IIRC and my first geforce 2 GTS.
 
Diamond Edge 3D with nVidia's original NV1 chip. The only game that used the "quadratic rendering" method the chip performed was the included version of Virtual Fighter. It had onboard sound which never worked. They promised Direct3D drivers and never delivered. I actually got Diamond to refund my purchase price due to false advertising.

I used the refund money to get a card with the Rendition V1000 chip. VQuake with fullscreen antialiasing looked better than GL Quake on the Voodoo 3D, but 3DFx got more support, so I got a Voodoo card too. I stuck with Rendition with the V2200, and ran that alongside a Voodoo 2. After that, I think it was an AGP Riva TNT. Since then, there have been to many to keep track.
 
My first card MX 420 and oldest working card (current) FX5900XL, oldest card I can put my hands on at this moment MSI 7900GT..
 
Eh... I had a 386 that I first upgraded from monochrome to CGA, and then from CGA to VGA via cheap ISA videocards found at the local used computer store. My first PCI videocard was a 3DFX Voodoo bashee. My first AGP videocard was an S3 Savage 4, which I got because I got a Voodoo2 and needed something to use for 2D.
I also built a heathkit 386 cga and upgraded to vga.... but my first big money video card was a 5800 ultra... that thing was a leaf blower it was so loud!
 
MY OWN first computer was a Sony Vaio. It had one of those funky Pentium 4 chips that were smashed on to the Pentium 3 package. Dad and I each bought a copy of Diablo 2, and that was my start into gaming. The onboard graphics ran the game ok (for the time), but I couldn't have the overlay map on while running around. I called Blizzard tech support, and they said I needed a card with hardware T&L. They recommended the Voodoo 4 4500. So, that's what I bought. The difference was night and day!

So, I started with a Voodoo 4 4500.
The rest is history:
ATi Radeon 7500 le (for RTCW, fuck, what a great game)
ATi Radeon 8500 (for BF1942)
ATi Radeon 9500 Pro 128MB (Omega driver mod to 9700 Pro)
ATi Radeon 9800 Pro 128MB (Tyan card...where did they go?)
nVidia Geforce 5900 (won this at a LANwar event, reference board)
nVidia Geforce 6800 GT (from BFG)
ATi Radeon x1600XT
ATi Radeon x1600XT Crossfire
AMD Radeon HD 5770 (XFX)
AMD Radeon HD 7950 (MSI)
AMD Radeon R9 280X (XFX, Crossfire with the above card)
nVidia Geforce 980 Ti (Zotac AMP! Omega)
 
first card I bought was a Trident tvga 9000, followed by an s3 virge backed up by the 3dfx voodoo 2. ran that voodoo 2 combo until 2007 when i finally left Windows 2000.
 
Mine was a no-name card with 1MB of ram and an ISA bus that claimed to be for gaming in some hyped way I don't remember anymore; but which sounded awesome to my 1995 ignorance. I puttered around with that on the family 486 for about 4 years. I got a new (home build) PC for college; only to discover a week or two in that the family member who built it bought a card that was basically a rebadged S3 Virge (the worlds only 3 DEcelerator). I replaced that for an nvidia TNT2 asap.
 
first ATI 3D Rage All-in-Wonder. Useless for gaming. But came with Mechwarrior 2, which I still have just for the soundtrack.
 
The first videocard I personally purchased was an nvidia 6600gt

Had a sexy mermaid on the box.
 
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