What Is Your Personal Favorite Video Card of All Time?

[JMCB]

Probably my bfg 8800gt. It survived a lot of builds and hours gaming on a 720p monitor. I have it sitting in my am2 dual core rig right now.

I had the EVGA 8800 GT, and I got it for free. My 7950 GT wasn't working and was discontinued, so I emailed them, said it wasn't working and they upgraded it for me at no cost. Also, the 8800 GT was less than two months old at the time, and I was blown away by the performance. Played the shit out of Crysis and MW4 on that bad boy with my first LCD 1680 x 1050 screen.

GeForce 6600 GT was the card for me. I had an older Geforce MX 420, which was my first GPU purchase, but what really got me into PC gaming was that 6600. Played CoD2 on that bad boy and was loving every moment of it!

 

[N4CR]

Traded a nice GTX570 1.25GB for an HD6950 2GB, then added a second, as I was running 2560x1600. When TechReport broke with their investigation into just how assed-up Crossfire was at the time, I was in no way surprised.

Performance scaling was negative almost all of the time. I went with AMD because they were producing higher-end GPUs with more memory at lower costs, and the framerates were there, but man if you could have seen 80FPS feel like a slideshow!

I'm glad that we're taking frametimes as a community very seriously now, and that there aren't any real deficiencies save for the first two generations of Threadripper due to consumer software stacks not being built with NUMA in mind. Even AMD's somewhat odd Zen configuration is putting out great low maximum frametimes!

Forgot about the frame time days. Took a while for them to get it right too!
I didn't even run CFX just single card (managed to kill one doing an accelero mod, whoops) and they were not a particularly nice card for a while, so can only imagine how painful CFX would have been.. poor you!

 

[Archaea]

3DFX Orchid Righteous 3D

 

[Stoly]

Gee it would be really hard to pick a favorite as I really enjoyed most of them. I would say that one of my favorites was (maybe surprisingly) the Geforce FX 5900 (bios modded to ultra). It was a hell of a card in spite of being slower in some games vs the Radeon 9800 Pro.

Fond memories of my Geforce 6800 and enjoying a lot my current GTX1070Ti

 

[cyklondx]

1st = palit 7600gs sonic -- ungodly overclock/mod potential
2nd = asus 7970 rog matrix -- build quality, performance, temps, and cooling noise. (last good asus cooling
3rd = msi 290x lightning -- build quality, unicorn oc, temps.
4th = ati all-in-wonder 128 pro 16mb -- quite capable, was beating 32mb geforces in most games.
generation?)

 

[Tactlesss]

The GeForce 256 32MB sdr was the first graphics card that I had any say in. Before that one of those Tseng Labs cards allowed me to play half life at least.

 

[dave343]

ATI 3D Charger 4MB

 

[RevPuk]

Geforce 3, because it was first "Flagship" gpu I owned. Was part of a small IT team, and we did a LOT of purchasing from Best Buy at the time to outfit the execs with LCD monitors and TV's for their offices. This was when an LCD monitor was ~$1000 and tvs were still a few grand.

Asked the CEO if we could have the points on a Best Buy program, and managed to get the whole team free cards. Back in those days, we would do LAN parties in the office sometimes on Saturdays. When the team showed up with their game rigs, there was a shiny new Geforce 3 on everyone's desk. Much Quake III fun was had that day. Boss man even had lunch catered for us.

 

[notarat]

I had "The Ultimate Trio Combo" of all time (the late 90s, anyway) which consisted of:

The Matrox G200 AGP for 2D paired with (2) Creative 3D Blaster II PCI Cards (Voodoo II 12Mb) in SLI

Quake II ran over 100fps effortlessly (with the AMD Drivers) while the Matrox provided the best 2D available at the time.

System specs were:

K6-2 300 at 336MHz
FIC VA-503 mobo
Matrox G200
(2) Creative 3D Blaster II cards in SLI
Jazz Multimedia MPEG Decoder card
Diamond Supra V.92 Modem
IBM SCSI card for IBM 4Gb SCSI
Soundblaster Live!
6Gb Western Digital HDD
1x SCSI CD Burner

All slots filled with no DMA conflicts in Win95 OSR 2. (That was a real achievement back then...srsly)


Edited for spelling and I left out my IDE HDD and SCSI CD Burner (Teac...remember them?)

 

[deaedius]

Geforce 256
x800 pro
1080ti

 

[amenx]

Last two, gtx1070, rtx2080.

 

[auntjemima]

 

[Auer]

 

[Mega6]

Radeon 9700 Pro

 

[Sta!nless]

GeForce 6600 GT was the card for me. I had an older Geforce MX 420, which was my first GPU purchase, but what really got me into PC gaming was that 6600. Played CoD2 on that bad boy and was loving every moment of it!

I forgot I had a 6600 GT.

It was the first card I benched and overclocked.

Many 3dmark2001 runs, and many more artifacts trying to set a world record.

I can't believe I didn't kill that card.

 

[-=SOF=-WID99]

ati 9800 Pro 9700 pro 9500 pro .. geforce gts 256 , voodoo 5 5500 ati X 800 XL flashed to an XT and of course my old Tseng labs 2 meg PCI card that i paid a ton of cash for to upgrade the mem chips on just to play links golf with on my old 486 .. and yes i still own em all ..oh and my diamond viper 550 AGP ..used to work great with a STB voodoo 2 black magic card ..sold both of those tho

 

[rhansen5_99]

Voodoo 5 5500 FTW.

 

[Teenk9]

Riva TNT. First 3D card I owned, bought used from ebay. Was blown away the first time I saw translucent water in Quake 2. Before that water was muddy brown.

 

[FlawleZ]

7800GTX 512MB

 

[cybereality]

Definitely this bad boy. 8800 GTS 512MB. Amazing card for $239 when it was new.

 

[JMCB]

Actually, come to think of it, while I said that the 6600 GT was the card, I take it back. I actually enjoy almost all the graphic cards I had. My Geforce MX 420 got me started from using software graphics. Everything looked SO MUCH BETTER! My 8800 GT let me play Crysis and MW4 and looked good doing so. The first time I had dual graphics with two HD 4870s - first time I had a monster rig. The 5970s I had were classy cards and a big jump. 7970s were a blessing from problems with my 6990. 4x R290Xs were sick; first time I watercooled graphic cards. The 1080 Ti was a monster coming from those after many years. The 2080 Ti is a BEAST.

I will say that the two that pissed me off the most were the 7950 GT (I had it only for 5 months and it just crapped out on me) and the 6990 / 6970 Tri-fire setup that I had. Oh so many problems with that thing running an eyefinity setup - got rid of it all and switch to a single monitor forever after that.

 

[AltTabbins]

It’s so hard to pick one but none of them are current generation.

Runners up:
Ati 9200 128mb - this was my first gpu. It was the difference between playing games and not playing games. It was also the first piece of hardware that I bought with my own money.

Nvidia 8800gtx 320mb - The value for the money on this card was insane. At the resolution I played at, only have 320mb of vram wasn’t much of an issue at all. I used this card longer than any other generation. It was a beast.

Winner:
Ati 9600xt - I used to go into CompUSA and stare at the 9800pro and 9800xt. Dreams of having the fastest graphics card and being able to play everything at max settings danced through my head just looking at the box art. Being a broke college student working part time to pay for ramen and rent meant I saved what I could but still came up short of the flagship mark. I read reviews of the 9600xt and “settled” for that card. When I used it I was blow away by its performance. I could play everything I wanted to at high settings. I was really happy with this purchase and having that feeling that I thought would only come with the top card. I love this card so much that I actually browse eBay every now and then hoping to find the exact model with the box (it was the gigabyte one).

 

[MacLeod]

Favorite card I didn't own was the 8800 GT. When I first got into PC gaming it was the best card on the market dollar for dollar. At $250 IIRC it was just out of reach for me at the time as I was broke as hell but I wanted one and tried to scrimp and save for a long time but never got one.

My favorite card I've owned would be my Powercolor 4850. That was the first card I tried overclocking on and I beat the balls off that thing and it never faltered. I bet that thing cranked out a million runs of the Crysis benchmark during its lifetime. It was also the best overclocking card I've ever had to this day. Easily the most fun I've had with a GPU.

 

[Gavian]

This card has gotten a bad rep but for some reason my favorite is the XFX HD 6970.

 

[Marvin54]

Favorite 8800 GTX xfx

 

[ManofGod]

The 3DFX 3D Monster II expansion card. It had 12MB of ram and when I installed it, it was like going from dial up to high speed internet.

Edit: Star Trek: Star Fleet Command looked incredible!

 

[dvsman]

Not in any particular order:

• Tseng ET4000 (I remember going to one of those weekend computer fairs to buy one of these)
  
• ATI 9700 (I got this one to play Asheron's Call)
  
• 8800 GTX (My first real AAA card)

 

[Dan_D]

8800GTX...it was a relevant high end video card for YEARS. I don't remember what brand I had...I think a PNY XLR8.

This. The 8800GTX sat at the top or near the top of the stack for years. I had three of them in 3-Way SLI. It was one of the best setups I ever had.

 

[next-Jin]

Riva TNT 2 Ultra.

 

[HockeyJon]

Geforce 3, because it was first "Flagship" gpu I owned. Was part of a small IT team, and we did a LOT of purchasing from Best Buy at the time to outfit the execs with LCD monitors and TV's for their offices. This was when an LCD monitor was ~$1000 and tvs were still a few grand.

Asked the CEO if we could have the points on a Best Buy program, and managed to get the whole team free cards. Back in those days, we would do LAN parties in the office sometimes on Saturdays. When the team showed up with their game rigs, there was a shiny new Geforce 3 on everyone's desk. Much Quake III fun was had that day. Boss man even had lunch catered for us.

Awesome! Love that story!

 

[FlawleZ]

This. The 8800GTX sat at the top or near the top of the stack for years. I had three of them in 3-Way SLI. It was one of the best setups I ever had.

The 8800GTX was the largest leap in performance over a single generation that I can remember. It ushered in the move to DX10. It also laid the foundation for future generations being the first with a unified shader architecture. And it wasn't because the 7 series cards weren't any good.

In fact G80(8800 Ultra) held the performance crown not only over ATI/AMD for 2 generations, but also over the GeForce 9 series.

 

[Stoly]

Riva TNT 2 Ultra.

That was my first nvidia card. Unfortunately I had an Acer PC that for whatever reason the AGP port was not compatible. I had to go to a friends house to play with it. Eventually I upgraded both pc and videocard

 

[DrDoU]

2 diamond cards in sli. I think they are in the garage some where. Monster i think was the name

 

[IdiotInCharge]

Forgot about the frame time days. Took a while for them to get it right too!
I didn't even run CFX just single card (managed to kill one doing an accelero mod, whoops) and they were not a particularly nice card for a while, so can only imagine how painful CFX would have been.. poor you!

It was a time for learning -- after parting the HD6950s out, ran a pair of GTX670s and then GTX970s, with one GTX970 in a box I game on regularly today.

Crossfire was brilliant when it worked, but paled in comparison to how well SLI was working up to a few years ago.

Of course, I'm not interested in multi-GPU until manufacturers have a come to Jesus moment like they did over v-sync and input lag.

 

[EmualDave2k12]

Voodoo 2 and Need for speed II SE …. was the best days of my gaming life

Now I have GTX 1070 utilized by my kids

 

[r00k]

VooDoo3 2000 PCI. Yep, i didn't even have an AGP slot. Glide was just a great API in its day.

Second to that, ATI Radeon 64M DDR VIVO

 

[mnewxcv]

Purple pcb gf4 ti4400. Maxed out half life 2 in dx8 mode.

Honorable mention goes to the 5900 non ultra that replaced it and took me into the dx9 Era. Back when CompUSA was my toy store.

 

[GotNoRice]

ATI / AMD 4870x2 for sure. I ran two of them in Quad-Crossfire for a very long time. Most of that was while running an Intel Q9650 @ 4.4Ghz but also for a bit after I upgraded to my Intel 2500k @ 5Ghz. All the games I cared about supported crossfire quite well, and even though they were DirectX 10.1 cards, they could still play DirectX 11 games. They put out tons of heat and sucked up tons of power. They are the reason why I bought the 1000w PSU that is still my main PSU all these years later.

 

[etegv]

AMD R9 290. Playing BF4 with Mantle was the best experience I have ever had with gaming. 144 fps gaming with no dips. I don't what happened with Mantle since, but I don't think Vulcan can hold a candle to it.

 

[Niner21]

Geforce 3 Ti200. This was my first purchase of a stand alone card that I installed myself into a prebuilt system. Taught myself how to upgrade then build computers myself along the way, but that card stands out to me because it was exciting.