Lightman, you're clearly nuts!
My vidcards: Aforementioned Tseng ET6000, a little later augmented with a VideoLogic (I think) PowerVR PCX1 board, later replaced with a Matrox M3D PowerVR PCX2 board. It pee'd me off quite a bit these boards ran A LOT slower on my supposedly superior new VIA Apollo MVP3 mobo than the older Intel TX chipset...
Then I replaced the video boards with an AGP 1x monstrosity based on the now VERY obscure Chromatic Researc Mpact 2 "multimedia accelerator". It had 8MB dual-channel 600MHz RDRAM (1.2GB/s theoretically), some basic 3D acceleration which was enough for Final Fantasy 7 and not much more and offered DVD playback in hardware (which did not work on the VIA mobo, instant bluescreen when I tried to run the player software - just more evidence that VIA is complete shite)...
I used the Mpact board for a couple months, then by mistake bought a 64-bit memory bus ATI Rage128 Pro board with 32MB SDRAM on it. Well, I meant to buy a Rage128 Pro board, just not one that had 64-bit memory.
Still, it was much faster than what I had had before, and it ran DVDs with very low CPU utilization (for the time anyway, about 30% tops). It also ran a decent game of Diablo 2, but could not handle Return to Castle Wolfenstein. In fact, my entire PC was not up to running that game.
Fortunately, I later upgraded in 2001 to a Dell Dimension 8100 box equipped with a P4-1.7GHz and a Geforce 3, which still stands here, in fully working order...! The GF3 was a big upgrade, but Morrowind still made it crawl.
It later got upgraded to an ATI Radeon 9700 Pro with 128MB extremely hot-running DDR memory so I could play Doom3 a bit better, which ALSO chugged on Morrowind I might add!
Next PC was a Dell Dimension 5000 bought in 2005 I believe, with BTX mobo, Nvidia 6800/256MB GDDR2 PCI Express graphics, SATA, on-board USB2 and all kinds of fun stuff. It was a great machine, that unfortunately expired on me late last year. PSU gave out most likely, too expensive to repair so I junked it and kept only a few bits and pieces.
Next PC after that, bought in 2008, was a Dell XPS 720 with dual 8800GTX pipes. Damn, those boards are some powerful workhorses! Still a lot of pure grunt left in them...!
I love them. Excellent image quality too.
My current PC, bought early 2009, is my first self-built box in almost 10 years. It has dual ATI Radeon HD 4890s and they're DAMN fast, but give kinda crap image quality compared to my old 8800s. Yeah, it sucks, but hey, at least they were cheap...!
