An XFX Nvidia FX 5200 with 250MB of memory, purchased way back in 2005 I think.
First PC gfx card was an ATI Rage Pro. Had a VoodooFX as well to play Doom etc.
Unbranded 3DFX card with 4MB of RAM. Back in the days when you had a graphics card and a separate 3D accelerator card.
I believe that was an OAK VGA card on an ISA bus for my self built 386-40. None of this modern 3D malarky :D
The 3D malarky started with a 3DFX Voodoo card, which was quite a few upgrades in. It was all about Doombench until then.
Try not to laugh but it was 30 years ago (1990 my first PC I built). some Cirrus Logic card… I think it was BEFORE the S3 Trio in 1995 and I am struggling to find a name, might be a Trident…
A lad at college flogged me a P965 (IIRC) Asrock board and a X1950 Pro for £30 in 2008!
The first card I bought was from Videologic. I can't remember the model, but it had an ET6000 GPU and 2.25MB RAM allowing 24bit colour at 800x600. It was a very good card for the DOS/Win95 era.
I later supplemented it with a Videologic Apocalypse 3Dx card which I found superior to the original Orchid Righteous 3dfx
My first PC was fitted with an ATI Rage 128. The first card I bought separately was a 3Dfx Voodoo 3 3000, which I bought as an upgrade a few months later.
AMD 9800xt long time ago just to play Black hawk down
Retina zorro card for an Amiga.
PC wise, it was a GeForce 2 MX200. I think. I also had Matrox Millenium cards, and now can't remember which I had first.
An nVidia GeForce 2, I think from ASUS back in 2001. I got a £1k bonus from work, an spent it on my first home computer.
Some Matrox thing - 2mb I think.
Well, I think my first PC graphics card was called a Vega. It went in a Dell ‘286, IIRC, in about 1984, maybe ’85.
However …. my real first card was an Apple card designed to be able to display actual colour, on an actual “monitor”, rather than using the standard TV modulator to use a TV as a display. This was on an Apple IIe in, IIRC, 1979.
A PCI Voodoo 3 to replace the terrible onboard ATI Rage Pro Turbo.
8800GTS, that I put in my first build, about 2010.
Not as old as everyone else, it was a passively cooled Asus Radeon HD 5450 1GB DDR3.
First separate card I bought - Matrox Millenium 4MB
Trident TVGA9000 512k ISA card.
Some noname Trident ISA card. It wasnt even a windows accelerator. But ar least it could handle 256 colours. Sometimes.
A Tseng 6000 after a while was such a beast!
Anybody remembers the Landmark speed test? :)
Ah the early 90s
The first one I actually bought was a GeForce 2 MX something. First one I used was something like the ATI 3D Rage.
Had something in prebuilts first but iirc the one I first bought was a geforce 3 500 series, I think, it was back around 2001, so really can't remember much about it lol.
Csikasz
Anybody remembers the Landmark speed test? :)
Ah the early 90s
This computer preforms like a 473Mhz AT with a 562Mhz 80287 or something like that :lol:
My Trident was good enough for DOS just about but Windows was very bad, I remember the Tseng cards being silly expensive at the time so ended up with a Cirrus Logic CL-GD5424 1MB VLB as the replacement.
First card I actually bought was a Guillemot Maxi Gamer Phoenix Banshee PCI Voodoo card.
S3 Trio64 upgraded to 2MB of RAM. Those sweet 16bit colors, man.
My first brand new and shiny card was GeForce 2 MX and it was glorious. Before that was a range of 2nd or 3rd hand Riva 128's, TNT's, 3Dfx and whatnot. To think I gamed more then than I do with my current 2070 Super. It seems as my system gets more powerful I use it less :-p
Can't remember the exact model - it was Genoa Legacy III series 512kb card
Trident VGA card.
The 1st 3D one was an S3 Virge.
Matrox millennium and shortly after that a vodoo card, for a really kick ass system.
I am not able to recall what GFX was in my 66 and 266 MHZ machines, but they was also fully build machines i never expanded on ( as far as i can remember )
The 2 cards was later replaced by a geforce 2 GTS.
Noname card with Chips & Technologies 82C451 GPU! :)
Well I had an IBM Luggable with a CGA card and Orange screen in the mid 80's - I started building my own in the late 80's. I recall buying an ATI Wonder in the 90's but the first VGA card was probably a Trident.
The very first one I started with was an S3 Virge DX card. It managed ok until I got a Guillemot TNT2 card and then a Voodoo3 AGP which lasted a good few years.
bcarteruk
Well I had an IBM Luggable with a CGA card and Orange screen in the mid 80's - I started building my own in the late 80's. I recall buying an ATI Wonder in the 90's but the first VGA card was probably a Trident.
Was that the thing like a cross between an old typewriter and a suitcase?
Fold-down top, with keyboard and about a 4" screen?
If so, I remember those. For a laugh, we installed AutoCAD. It ran, but took about an hour to redraw the Space Shuttle drawing …. in wireframe mode.
It really struggled …. but battled on and did it. Which surprised us greatly.
Very first computer was a Spectrum 48K circa 1984. But the first discrete graphics card I bought was this S3 Trio 64V+ , with 1 Megabyte (yep) of VRAM. As it had some empty sockets on the PCB, I remember visiting local computer stores to find out if I could pimp it by adding another 1Mb of VRAM but, sadly not.
https://imgur.com/a/MZsJyQM
Cirrus Logic, specced as part of a PC with a 486SX-33 CPU and probably 4MB RAM. From a company in Nottingham that advertised in the magazines - remember Micro Mart?
First standalone purchase I think was a Creative Labs Voodoo II.
dannyboy75
Very first computer was a Spectrum 48K circa 1984. But the first discrete graphics card I bought was this S3 Trio 64V+ , with 1 Megabyte (yep) of VRAM. As it had some empty sockets on the PCB, I remember visiting local computer stores to find out if I could pimp it by adding another 1Mb of VRAM but, sadly not.
https://imgur.com/a/MZsJyQM
You were misinformed they were upgradeable using SOJ-40 256k x16 EDO DRAM chips.
rs4847
You were misinformed they were upgradeable using SOJ-40 256k x16 EDO DRAM chips.
Dammit, so I could’ve pimped that bad boy after all :D
I'm a young ‘un, the first card I bought was a Radeon 6870 for $150 near the end of 2011. Graphics cards were a bargain back then, perhaps in part because hard drives were not as a result of the floods in Thailand.
But it’s not the oldest card I've bought. That would be a Diamond Stealth 1 MB VLB card, in an attempt to revive my family's oldest computer. Alas, the problem was not the GPU, but most likely the motherboard, and I never got around to replacing that. Confirmation that the hard drives were also dead lessened the motivation for that project.
I've also bought a few 8600M GT cards, as spares for my first laptop. Those cards have a tendency to kick the bucket more quickly than the average card, but thankfully the laptop I use them in allows for replacing the GPU. So that would be the oldest card I've purchased and been able to put to use.
A single slot 256MB Leadtek 8800GT in 2008. Worked fine for the 1280x1024 resolution I used at the time. The 2x DVI sockets it had certainly haven't aged well though, part of the reason it I replaced it 2 years later.
3dfx Voodoo Banshee, but had some of those that you could add more memory by adding chips to the board for 1,2 or 4Mb.
3DFX Voodoo 2, in SLI. YES SLI!!!! Think we were still PCI in those days, but if I look back….what a machine.
Half life never looked so good!! So many hours wasted on death match.
It was nVidia Riva TNT2 16 MB
Diamond Stealth 3D 2000. Really enjoyed that card.
I think a Paradise VGA Plus 16, and when that failed, some S3 Virge thing?
I think it was a Diamond Savage 3D or something, I had a company build it for me, as I was still too new to PC scene to build it myself.
Voodoo Banshee and Riva TNT2 were also cards I owned along the way, but so far back I forget the order. Then it becomes a little more clear - Geforce 3, Radeon 9700 Pro, X800 GTO2 (soft modded to X800 XT i think?), 9800…too many to remember to be honest.
A few others a long the way, working back…
2070 Super
RX 5700 XT
GTX 1080
GTX 970
HD 7970
HD 7870
GTX 460
HD 4850X2
HD 4870
8800 GT
Long time Hexus reader, first post. Always loved the QOTW wish I'd registered earlier :)
I always had some integrated graphics in my PCs, before I got into hardware and then I discovered a whole new world. My 1st graphics card I bought with my own money was the ATI Radeon 9500 (R300?)
I was still very new to the whole thing, and my only question to the guy selling it was “will it run Half Life 2?”
The first one I bought as a stand-alone component was a Geforce 4 MX440 but prior to that I was using a Voodoo 4 from a friend, before then I believe my first windows based machine had a 4MB video card of some sort, it was inside a Packard Bell pre-build running a P166 CPU. Adiboo anybody?
An ATI Radeon 128mb… I think, can't remember the exact model. Although technically my dad bought it so I could finally play some PC games, fond memories!
Not counting stuff pre-installed in pre-built systems, the first actual discrete graphics I bought was a Leadtek 128MB 6600GT. I loved that card, and remember it came with a couple of free games, one was Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, which looked great, but I wasn't very good at.
It was such a great feeling to finally play some games, as I had previously been making do with a rubbish and very dated 32MB TNT2 that was literally soldered onto the motherboard of the pre-built Time PC I had previously used.
I remember one of the first few games I played was Deus Ex: Invisible War, sadly a game not fondly remembered compared to the excellent first game, but I still enjoyed playing it, despite its faults. I still don't think I was able to put everything on max, as it was quite demanding, but not far off anyway.
The card cost around £130 when I got it around March 2005, and it was part of a complete new system with an Athlon 64 3200+ and 1GB RAM. I chose the Leadtek after reading quite a few reviews that compared the different brands on cooling+heatsink quality. I think the heatsink/fan on the Leadtek wasn't the best mounting system, as it was quite flimsy, but it ran cool enough, and not too loud… the stock AMD CPU fan drowned out everything else when it ramped up to full speed. The PCB was just a boring green one, but I liked the design of the fan/heatsink.
After a couple of years, the PC itself was used for LAN gaming only up until around 2018 when it finally failed, but the Leadtek 6600GT was replaced around 2010-2011 ish after it started getting artifacts. It's successor/replacement was a Palit GT 220, which is still used today in a PC also only used for LAN gaming with my Dad.
Nvidia MX 440
cheap dirt, but it worked
First was 2D, then added dedicated 3D, then a combined 2D/3D card.
1995 Diamond Stealth64 Video VRAM PCI (S3 Vision 968 2MB VRAM)
1997 Diamond Multimedia Monster 3D (3Dfx Voodoo1 4MB EDO)
1998 Matrox Millennium G200 (8MB SGRAM)
Diamond Moster 3D 4MB (3Dfx Voodoo 1).
Some Cirrus Logic 1MB card, though I really wanted the S3 Vision 968 which I couldn't afford then.
S3 trio 4mb sram running on P2 233mhz with MMX tech
My first pc build included the first generation of a 3DFX Voodoo card.
Can´t remember exacly what was the oldest. Chronology from back then is starting to fail me. Def had
S3 Virge DX
Voodoo banshee
Diamond stealth
at some point. After a TNT2 and maybe a geforce4200 I had a voodoo 5500 which was huge, though probably not up to titan size.
Picasso IV with 4MB Ram for Amiga Zorro3. Best card ever made and still is.
Dont laugh ppl.
That was a 8087 coprocessor for my 8086 so elite would run smoother when drawing triangles in the ´80s.
my first was an ATI rage pro and then on the second setup i jumped on an Nvidia 4200
My first Card was (please do not laugh :) ) A Tseng ET 3000 ISA BUS 386SX. OS was DOS. This card was in my first pc i had.
Hercules Prophet II MX Dual GPU (GeForce MX2). Back then, I hadn't figured the MX variants were budget cards and was quite unimpressed with my new card's performance in Deus Ex.
I think a Sparkle s3 video card for my 386 desktop was the first I ever installed. Butchered quite a few machines back in the day, kinda like Frankenstein's monster some of my builds.
Leadtek WinFast 3D L2300 8MB.
It was a 3D LABS Permedia 2 card made for CAD applications back in 1998.
In most of the games, the lights (i.e. Need for Speed) would be rendered on an opaque black background, making them unplayable in some cases.
GeForce 3 Ti500 I believe
Diamond Viper V550 16mb if I remember right
I did'ent get started in gamming for some years but my first gpu was I think the best little gpu I ever used and still use in other builds today and that is the G-Force GT 610 but for gamming I went up to a GTX 690ti then to a GTX 1070. I still like the 610 cheep and good for the price
The first one I can remember was in the late 90's, an ATI All-in-Wonder. I bought it specifically so I could connect the PC to the huge 28" CRT in the lounge. A few years later it was a Voodoo 3 2000 to play Quake III
My first card was the 9250 and I have been with the red team since then,
until I bought a 1080ti KiNGPiN a couple of years ago :p
My first personal build was an ATI 9600XT. For the family computer it was a 2D accelerator that could run Catacombs Abyss, EGA graphics and a 286 running at 12Mhz with 4MB RAM (with chips no DIMM, SIMM, SDRAM, EDO, Fast page malarkey) it was too long ago to remember what it was I'm afraid…
Matrox Millennium, but which version I cannot remember, it would have been the early 90's I think. Would have been the first time I had more than 256 colours on my PC. I probably still have it in a box somewhere.
3dfx voodoo banshee with 16 meg on baord. Came with a free copy of Unreal (the original game) which ran like a rocket on GLide.
For me, it was Orchid Technology's Righteous 3D card (powered by 3Dfx's Voodoo graphics chip) purchased back in October '96. Those were the days.
Hmm… i got some kind of VGA with my 386sx 25. Then i bought 3DFX Voodoo.
oh shoot er Mx something was it MX64? that's a long long time ago now. Ran Quake 3 just fine.
My first few PCs had integrated graphics, but the first discrete graphics card I bought was the Rendition Verite V1000 (Creative Labs 3D Blaster PCI). It had miniGL drivers for Quake, which had a huge impact on me, being the first graphically accelerated game I'd ever played.
Radeon 9700 pro, its still sitting on the shelf with all the other old units.
Saphire 3850 512 mb DDR3.Quite a rare model used mainly DDR4 memory.
it was a 3dfx Banshee card (made by Creative if memory serves). I loved that card and thought it was the greatest thing ever.
PNY Verto AGP 4x GeForce4 Ti 4200 64MB DDR Video Card is the earliest one I can remember. I switched out so many cards back then. I do remember this one though.
This was really expensive at the time also. I mostly upgraded many times for Unreal Tournament 1999. Couldn't find a video card that ran it well back then. I should of just saved money for a Big NV video card edition. Instead I went the cheap route and wasted more money upgrading. I would eventually switch to ATI's 2600XT I think it was, until the game ran fine. This would follow the trend of switching between ATi and Nvidia until the Geforce 770 and followed by the 1070. I have been disappointed by video cards in the past. So I finally adopted the go big or go home. In terms of Vram anyway. Too many times have I been screwed over by lack of vram for games or core clock. I usually wait until a video card is on sale too get it. I will usually go for the 2nd or 3rd high end card down. I didn't get the internet until mid 2000's. So all my decisions were based on PC hardware mags. I still miss PC gamer's demo disc and that crazy coconut monkey.
Fairly sure the first PC i bought had an ATI Mach 64 in it.
First card I bought was a Matrox Mystique, and about 6 months later, a Monster 3D/fx, both of which I still have somewhere.
The first graphics card I purchased with my own money was a horrible AMD XFX HD 5830 1GB which I later fitted with a half-decent DeepCool V400 cooler to make it a bit quieter. The first GPU I remember choosing was an ATI Gigabyte X1600XT 256MB Silent Pipe fanless card in 2005. I think I changed it rather quickly though as the early heat pipes were not as miraculous as people thought and it was overheating heavily. The first graphics card I remember in a PC that I can sort of call my own was a GeForce 2 MX400 which was absolutely rocking Warcraft III at the time.
Probably a Matrox Millennium II. Upgrading the original Millennium that came with the system.
At a guess somewhere around 1996. Oh those were the days.
3DFX Voodoo back in ‘97. State of the bleedin’ art!
Nvidia TNT2, solid card at the time.
Trident 8900CL. With a whopping 2MB of RAM.
Methanoid
Try not to laugh but it was 30 years ago (1990 my first PC I built). some Cirrus Logic card… I think it was BEFORE the S3 Trio in 1995 and I am struggling to find a name, might be a Trident…
5446?
3dfx voodoo2 for me, always remember the unreal intro around the castle after installing the card and was amazed when glide was enabled compared to software
3Dfx Voodoo….It was AWESOME!! :-)
A GeForce 4 MX or 440 MX i think it was called, i still have it somewhere.
I think it was a PowerVR 3D accelerator.
I think it was S3 Verge or something. Three months later I got Nvidia Riva TNT.It was in last century. I am really old.
Matrox Millenium 2 550? in first PC build 1999, Pentium 3?
Mine too was 30+ years ago. I think my first PC graphics card might have been an EGA card.Although before that I had an Apple ][+ with inbuilt graphics. And I started off on a ZX81 which had its own graphics too. Wow. 40 years.
But I remember Oak, Trident, Cirrus Logic, and many more.
Quartz
But I remember Oak, Trident, Cirrus Logic, and many more.
I remember wondering if I should get a gtx460 or wait for Larrabee just in case it was something special. :lol:
No idea… Lost in the mists of time. It also depends on whether you included completed machines. First machine was an Pentium 200MMX in 1998 and I think it had some form of ATI card? I remember it coming bundled with some 3d games when they where still pretty new! First machine I built had a geforce 2mx I think?
Edit: No reading others replies - It was a TNT2! I think I later had a 4mx I'm getting confused with. I could remember all this stuff before I had kids!
First PC card I purchased separately was a voodoo 3 2000, although I owned PC's before then.
It's twenty plus years ago but I seem to recall some kind of ATI card.
I think my first one was an AGP ATI 9600 that I unlocked the BIOS on so it ran like a Pro. It ran Far Cry, which was what I wanted it for.
cheesemp
No idea… Lost in the mists of time. It also depends on whether you included completed machines. First machine was an Pentium 200MMX in 1998 and I think it had some form of ATI card? I remember it coming bundled with some 3d games when they where still pretty new! First machine I built had a geforce 2mx I think?
Edit: No reading others replies - It was a TNT2! I think I later had a 4mx I'm getting confused with. I could remember all this stuff before I had kids!
I had the diamond viper TNT 16MB, then went to a 440mx,(Edit: I had an ATI 6600 at some point) I had the the dreaded Nvidia 6200… terrible card, then to the amazing super overclocker HD7850 2GB (that card served me well!)
The first graphics card I ever owned was a Ti4200, which came in a pre-built Mesh PC…
But the first one I actually bought… how can I forget.
ATi Radeon 9800 Pro
Absolutely destroyed the GeForce, and I've had a red team soft spot ever since :)
It was the Orchid Righteous 3D. The first 3dfx voodoo graphics card and it made Quake 2 look and feel so good!
A Tseng ET4000 with 386DX in ‘91-’92, and later ATI Rage II+ with a Pentium MMX 166.
After that, of course, Diamond Monster 3D Voodoo 1.
Way too far back to remember but definitely had a 3Dfx Voodoo.
Still have a login on the 3dfx website.
Mine was an S3 801 graphics card featuring the wonderfully long VESA Local Bus (VLB)! No heatsink or fan required. Come to think of it - neither did the CPU… PSU was full size all the same…
I do remember this one well :)
A S3 Savage4 32MB PCI version.
Was to go in the prebuilt PC i got for uni (AMD K6-2 333mhz, 64MB RAM) Due to the terrible PC-CHIPS mobo* and it's lack of an AGP slot, this was one of the few cards that'd fit in the PC.
* containing a wondrous SIS 8MB onboard GPU that actually ran quake magnitudes slower in GPU accelerated mode than it did with CPU software rendering!
First graphics card i purchased separately was an MSI geforce4 mx440 - 64mb RAM
The first GPU I bought separately was an ATI Radeon HD 4870 1GB.
Before that my GPUs were what came with the pre-built systems I bought (NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 and NVIDIA GeForce 8800GT respectively).
Hello,
Long time listener, first time caller (I registered just to post this).
The oldest video card I still have is this NEC MultiSync Graphics Engine, which was released in 1989:
https://i.imgur.com/vHtP982.jpgThis is the higher-end MGE-AG 256 model, which has an ISA interface and a full 1MB of VRAM; there was also an MCA version, but I never owned an IBM PS/2 computer. This card had a 50MHz Texas Instruements TMS34010 programmable graphics processor on it, which was then often called a transputer because it was fully programmable and interfaced directly with DRAM and VRAM. It also had a Chips and Technology P82C611 chipset, if I recall correctly, for VGA duties. With all that hardware, it could do 1024x768 in 256 simultaneous colors (from a palette of 262K)
I think I got it from JDR Microdevices in San Jose, CA. The cost was around $1,500 in 1990. My first PC was an 80386SX, but I fairly quickly got an 80486DX after that. Prior to those I had used Commodore computers from C64 to Amiga 2000, but none of those had a separate graphics card. Sadly, I no longer have the paperwork or box for the card (lost in a pipe burst), but I do believe I have the floppy diskettes with the Windows 3.1 and CAD drivers for it someplace.
Regards,
Aryeh Goretsky
Nice first post, Ayreh - welcome officially to Hexus!
