[Retrohardware] Your least favorite graphic card

Powercolor Radeon 9600 Pro (was NOT a pro) I bought in 2004. In my country you don't normally go for a third party HSF for a variety of reasons.. but anyhow. Two months into the card its fan started shaking. Settling at about 10 RPM, it made aircraft noise. And one fine night playing BF2, the card killed itself completely, causing the following components of my computer to blow up (not once, but thrice on attempted replacement..):-

- Processor (Prescott)
- Motherboard (Intel 865GBF)
- Power Supply

Had it not been for my kind vendor.. this would have cost me some healthy pocket weight. The corpse now lies proudly in its box (still new).

 

Yeah Trident were some slow suckers also. However, I think the ATI Wonder + predated that chip. Not sure though. But the thing that makes it stand out is because the reviews in computer mags made it out to be the fastest 16/24/32 (can't remember if it was also 32 bit or not) bit accelerator for Windows. And omg it was dog slow. And cost about 4x as much as a generic Tseng ET4000 based card.

Regards
SB

 

Well it must win an award for most overhyped, overblown waste of money then.

 

Wow, I have to say that the best thing about my TNT2 Ultra was it's 2D. It was actually quite good. Geforce 2? Ugh. Abysmal 2D. Geforce 3 wasn't too bad.

I must be fairly tolerant; I had an S3 Virge in a laptop that wasn't too bad...for a laptop at that time..LOL.

 

Laptop graphics usually are direct digital links to the LCD. No blur is gonna come from that.

 

How far back do we have to go for "retro" status?

I had an FX 5200 that turned me from an NV fan (believe it or not) into an NV-hater.

Prior to that my most troublesome card was an original Radeon I still loved it though. Ran Team Fortress Classic wonderfully (when it worked ).

 

NV hater? Congrats, you've found the right forum then.

 

Mine

ATi Rage IIC

horrible drivers, horrible performance even 10 years ago...

 

An ATI rage something or other. It would not play opengl quake2. I was so pissed off b/c it said it would, but the drivers would not work on nt or win2k ever to play. Supposedly it would work on 98 but I did not want to install another os just b/c the card sucked...

 

It is b/c you expect crappy cards to be horrid. A ''good'' card that lets you down seems much worse.