What was the very first video card you ever bought?

First brand new one I ever bought, the Palit Sonic GTX 570

Before that I was poor and all were second hand cards:
Nvidia 9600 gt x 2 (ran them sli until I got the 570)
Sapphire Radeon x1600
Geforce FX 5200
 
Slyr7.62 said:
Old, older, and oldest. Not necessarily in the correct order. lol.
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It was the late 90s, I didn't know better. Really, I didn't even have a stable internet connection at the time and had to go by what magazines said... :(
 
Slyr7.62 said:
For the last 5 or 6 years Ive been skipping multple gens.
You can tell im under 30 by my past gpu's.
My first gpu was ati all in wonder 7500
geforce 5200
5600 gt
5950 Ultra $200 or so
6800 GT for $380 when It just came out & I was working alot.
Won a 7950GX2 at a showdownlan. put on by pdxlan people in 06 to 08 iirc.
Gtx 260 for only $160... nice improvement.
gtx 460 for $40 lawl, helps my average gpu cost.



Old, older, and oldest. Not necessarily in the correct order. lol.
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Hey I miss the old days! I still have my Voodoo II's around here somewhere along with my Hercules 3D Prophet III! My 300A is still boxed up around here as well. I managed to get 500mhz out of a 300mhz stock chip. Some of the hardware back then could do incredible things.

These days I spend more time yelling at people to get off my lawn than tweaking my PC though. :p
 
My first "video card" was Mac II built in video on a Macintosh LC III. After that I moved to the PC world with a Matrox G200 and a Diamond Monster 3D Voodoo1. I've gone through hundreds of cards since, run a computer repair business.

DigitalGriffin said:
Diamond VGA 512 (?Paradise?)....512K was considered a mind bending about of memory back then. You could run 640x480 in 16.7 million colors!
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I think your memory has a bit of rose tinted glasses.

24 bit color at 640x480 would require 900 kb of VRAM and then some for overhead.

You could happily chug along at 320x240 with 24 bit color though.
 
GiGaBiTe said:
My first "video card" was Mac II built in video on a Macintosh LC III. After that I moved to the PC world with a Matrox G200 and a Diamond Monster 3D Voodoo1. I've gone through hundreds of cards since, run a computer repair business.



I think your memory has a bit of rose tinted glasses.

24 bit color at 640x480 would require 900 kb of VRAM and then some for overhead.

You could happily chug along at 320x240 with 24 bit color though.
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Quite right. I was remembering things wrong.
 
I think a GTX 420... i think... was first time i had ever heard of a CPU holding back a GPU. which is funny because it was diablo 2...
 
Maybe a Diamond S3-Virge? The most memorable leap in performance for me came when I bought an Asus V6600 Deluxe, which was a non-reference GeForce256 video card with some fancy options.
 
My first real video card was a Voodoo Banshee. It was a decent card, but not as cool as the real Voodoos.
After that, I've had too many to remember.
TNT2
Geforce 1 or 2
Geforce 7800 and 8800
Radeon 9500np modded to 9700pro
Geforce 280
Geforce 580
Now: Some crappy 420MX (I think) that I'm shocked drives a 2560x1600 display while i use my laptop's 960M and wait for decent prices on a 1080 or 1080ti/Titan P.
 
Hellstoaster said:
Hey I miss the old days! I still have my Voodoo II's around here somewhere along with my Hercules 3D Prophet III! My 300A is still boxed up around here as well. I managed to get 500mhz out of a 300mhz stock chip. Some of the hardware back then could do incredible things.

These days I spend more time yelling at people to get off my lawn than tweaking my PC though. :p
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Some older cards worked pretty good for years and years. I put a 6800 gt in a relative's pc still used.
That's cool you have those neat old cards. I like the 7950 gx2 i got for free, lol.
it's fun to get nostalgic, huh.... says this under 30-yr old. :eek:

I had dialup for a while also. Kept me from playing Ut2k4 and call of duty 2 so some people had a headstart. :)
 
I didn't get into computer building till early 2000ish but my first card was a BFG 8800GT. That card was pretty awesome and I ended up buying another for SLI. Haven't ran SLI since.

I recall UV reactive components were the latest trend at the time and my cards had a pretty cool BFG man that glowed along with my DFI LanParty mobo and cables. Ah those were the days before these newfangled RGBs. Lol
 
jarablue said:
Mine was a ATI Rage 128 Pro PCI that I returned the same day to best buy for a Voodoo 3 2000 PCI that went back the next day for a Voodoo3 3000 AGP.

This was in June of 1999, before then from 1990 - 1999 I was onboard video man. Fear me. What was your first card?
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Monster 3D and I upgraded the jsod (jpod? can't remember, they were the weird ones that you pressed into the open slots) ram chips on my mother board from one mb to two. They came packaged in a tube, and I had to upgrade the s3 onboard to support the 3Dfx card. That was state of the art shit.
 
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GTS 8800 bought it to play Age of Conan when I was addicted to MMOs.
 
My first card was Voodoo 2 8MB. It changed my gaming life for good.
 
Think it was an ATI 'Graphics Expression' in 1993. Then about a year or two later got a 3DFX Voodoo add-in card... That was BIG TIME then!! For Doom, Aces Over Europe, and Duke Nukem...
 
YAY... another "What was your first video card" thread..... :wtf: First GPU I bought was a S3 Virge DX with 2mb ram, also bought 2MB ( 2 x1mb chips) vram to give me 4mb total.. Duke3D played like a champ with that video card and my 486 DX66 in that packard bell... oh the good times
 
Trident 9865 then
Voodoo 3 2000 PCI
Riva TNT2 Model 64
ATI Radeon 64MB DDR VIVO

several other radeons in between
Radeon 5850 x2 crossfire
GTX 660 ti (still using in this workstation)
R9 270x x2 crossfire
GTX 970 + GTX 960

When all is said and done, looking back, 3DFX Glide API was the most beautiful of the bunch. Really wish they were still around. Having been in both camps several times, i won't buy AMD / ATI products. nVidia has always been far more stable and reliable.
 
First card was a 3DFX branded Voodoo 2 12MB card. Going from software rendering in Half Life to OpenGL at 800x600 kind of blew my mind at the time.
 
First discreet video card was a Sierra Screamin 3d. (sold by the computer game company that used to make a bunch of point and click adventure games)

I think that was back before the 3dfx voodoo had even launched.
 
First 3D card was an ATI 3d Expression PC2TV. It was basically a ATI Mach64 (anyone remember those in the 3.1/95 days?) with the minimal amount of hardware needed to support DirectX. I got it more because I wanted to use a TV as a monitor.

A few months later I got a Voodoo1 right when memory got cheap and they dropped like $100 in price.
 
Cirrus Logic 5428 VLB.

After 2001, I can consult my NewEgg order history, lmao

That said, there was another place I used to order from way back in the day - I want to say they were out of Texas, and started with an A? I used to order Chenbro full tower cases from them, way back.... all beige and tan site is all I remember lol
 
With my own money, ATI 4870 used for 7 years. 2nd card was a EVGA FTW 1080.

Before the 4870 I bought a ATI 9800 AIW that was used for 4 years, actually this might still be in use by my father.
 
i think, if i remember correctly, it was a Matrox with 512KB of memory upgradeable to 1MB, back in '95 or '96.
 
MN Scout said:
With my own money, ATI 4870 used for 7 years. 2nd card was a EVGA FTW 1080.

Before the 4870 I bought a ATI 9800 AIW that was used for 4 years, actually this might still be in use by my father.
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That must have felt like a huge upgrade there. Tried playing crysis on it? ;)
 
Tseng labs ET 6000 PCI card had 1 meg of ram ..Expandable to 2 meg ... bought 2 chips at a Computer show and had a wopping 2 meg of ram for only $32 ..still have it ...and yep its still works..comes in handy when ya have a problem with a motherboard and bad PCI express \ AGP slot so ya can at least boot .

only reason i keep it around ...

was a nice upgrade over my Cirruis logic VLB 512 K card that came with my first PC with a 486 DX 100
 
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