Do you remember your most disappointing video card ever?

[Vayra86]

EVGA GTX 660 Superclocked

TIMES TWO

After five minutes of gaming, it was like jumbo jets were taking off, and FPS went all over the place. That moment you learn why midrange cards with a radial blower should not be placed in SLI.

Yeah that was once and never again

 

[NeDix!]

well, since all my card had been used card, and do researcher before buy, i never had disappointing performance, but i can say 2 things...

1.- my 5850 has reference turbine cooler, i learned there, NEVER AGAIN turbine cooler, still was an awesome card and STILL WANT TO TEST A 5870
2.- i recommened to a friend a 960, he didnt want to buy used so, it was the only shit there, still its the worst x60 card from nvidia in the last few years (well since kepler)

 

[AsRock]

Was it a dram chip? I'm curious once more

No, there is\was a small voltage chip on the rear of them which got real hot. Don't know if the information is still available after all these years but a bunch of people had issue's with it, some put heat sinks on it.

My bad it was a eVGA 7800GT OCSC.

 

[nexus_a]

GTX465 by far. So noisy and hot, a year later the card stopped working. When I removed the heatsink there's a black mess there. It has melted!

 

[jagjitnatt]

Since we are talking of disappointment, do any of the old timers remember SiS 6215C PCI ?
Even Road rash would not get 30 FPS on that card. An upgrade to NVidia RIVA TNT2 M64 felt like GOD.
The most surprising upgrade though was incidental. I ran a williamette P4 1.6 with SD RAM, wanted to upgrade to DDR, so got another motherboard with 845 chipset, the board had what looked like an AGP port, but it was not. It was a physical AGP, but only worked with special cards, it was called XGP port. My TNT2 could no longer work on it, so I had to use onboard Intel Extreme graphics, kid you not, it was actually much faster than the RIVA TNT2. Never underestimated onboard chips ever again.

Another disappointment for me was 9200SE I upgraded to from Intel extreme. I thought SE stood for Special edition, it was actually much worse than a regular 9200.

My favorite card ever was X1900GT though. The memory was clocked at 600 Mhz, but it was a 700Mhz RAM chip, so everyone could clock it to 700 at least, mine OC'ed to 918 Mhz. It was crazy, 50%+ oc on air cooling. I had the Accelero X2 slapped on it. Looked amazing. It was a blessing to have HDR and AA both enabled. NVidia could only do 1 at a time.

 

[TheLostSwede]

Since we are talking of disappointment, do any of the old timers remember SiS 6215C PCI ?

I hope you didn't pay money for that garbage. The only thing worse than SiS was PC Chips no-name stuff, which often was re-branded SiS...

 

[DRDNA]

My worst was a ATI 9600 Pro or maybe it was the 9200....but yeah it looked like it would be wow but it was only jeewiz cant this thing do better? I need to OC this beotch!

 

[Kanan]

I hope you didn't pay money for that garbage. The only thing worse than SiS was PC Chips no-name stuff, which often was re-branded SiS...

My Rage II+ was worse, see my first post here for the fail description

 

[jormungand]

XFX BLACK EDITION 9800gtx hottttt as hell. I got rid of it in less than a month. All the other ones i had i loved them.

 

[Artas1984]

Well, I was a bit disappointed with the fact that my first PC only had 256KB of graphics memory and I was unable to get hold of the memory upgrade chips to make it 512KB so I could get enough graphics memory for VGA resolution. As such, I could only play at MCGA. I think it was a Cirrus Logic chip, if I don't remember all wrong.

WOW, you must be the owner of the oldest video chip that you bought yourself that i've read in the forums in a long time.

Does Intel's GMA count? One hell of sucking chipset.

Yes. I forgot about that shit. It was the second most disappointing thing, not only because it sucked in performance, which i knew about, but because it did not even work with some 3D games - the games crashed on launch when that shit was being just present in the system (even with dedicated GPU on AGP lane). I had to sell my motherboard in order to get some P965 without integrated graphics.

The only video card I really remember being a disappointment was my Matrox MGA Mystique. The poor video quality and horribly slow 2D speeds were unexpected and unwelcome with such an expensive price tag for the time. These were the early and uncertain times of accelerated graphics. The real salt in the wound was the much better performing alternatives that were released soon after from ATI and Nvid

Wait, what? Slow 2D speeds? How does one interpret that? LOL. It could not run Heroes of Might and Magic II?

HD5870. Swapped it for a gtx470 instead.

But why? HD5870 was on pair with GTX470 in performance.

Geforce 6200 BFG edition. Man, the box made it sound like it could play Crysis on Ultra, and Crysis wasn't even out yet... It was a turd, but it did run Oblivion, which was all I wanted at the time.

It's hilarious to read that a BFG attribute could be given to a low end card, as if it was ready for Doom 3.. Even GF 7600GT sucked in Doom 3.

The Nvidia G105M in my old laptop (8 CUDA cores , yeah single digit ). I knew it wasn't supposed to be anywhere near good , but holy crap...absolutely every even remotely modern game at the time that I have tried wasn't anywhere near playable , 800x600 and all that.

I used to repair laptops in the past, i know what are you talking about. The 105M is a nightmare in terms of performance, reliability, overheating. Worst case scenario - 105M in some Acme or Acer laptop - a developing cancer.

I guess I have to say my XFX 9600GT.

I had that card (overclocked XXX edition) and it was awesome. It bested HD2900XT and HD3870 in FEAR, Crysis and Doom 3.

For me it was Asus HD4870 . The card was a beast, but that "egg" cooler...ohh boy....jet engine is an understatement. And +1 for GeForce4 MX* 440. Actually that was my worst card ever.

Aaa, nice memories.. Had that one too in some HD4800 series card! I can confirm it was unbelievably loud! Perhaps the loudest card i ever had.

3. Some generic (Diamond multi media?) PCI graphics card. After my pentium 90 (with AGP) died and was 'upgraded' to a celeron 400A, i had to downgrade back to PCI... and got some total POS with no pixel or vertex shaders, and set my PC back about 5 years in performance and compatibility. Built my own PC's after that one.

That's horrible, but at least that Celeron had some memory cache

I know what your thinking, this card has everything, tons of RAM, powerful GPU, and the mega powerful fan. But its not as good as it looks

Looks like HD7400, which is probably adequate for HTCP? It even has HDMI?

 

[rtwjunkie]

It's hilarious to read that a BFG attribute could be given to a low end card, as if it was ready for Doom 3.. Even GF 7600GT sucked in Doom 3.

BFG was a company that went out of business somewhere around 2005. 95% of their business was GPU's and the rest was specialized motherboards, such as the various NForce ones.

 

[Artas1984]

BFG was a company that went out of business somewhere around 2005. 95% of their business was GPU's and the rest was specialized motherboards, such as the various NForce ones.

He said BFG edition, not BFG GeForce 6200. Of course i remember BFG video cards, i had some of them! At that time owning a BFG card was considered an awesome thing.

 

[Bo$$]

7300LE in SLI

 

[r.h.p]

Ge force 7900 gt

 

[Divide Overflow]

Wait, what? Slow 2D speeds? How does one interpret that? LOL. It could not run Heroes of Might and Magic II?

It had a problem processing and displaying DOS commands. Which one still used from time to time.

 

[jagjitnatt]

7300LE in SLI

You sir are the man for even trying SLI on that thing cause $hit + $hit only equals more $hit

 

[FilipM]

Worst card I've ever had in my PC, MX440 - thing was just poop.

Worst card I've ever come across - FX5200 - thing was poop squared

 

[Artas1984]

Never been disappointed. I do my research before buying.

To be honest in my many years i never had a disappointing GPU because i know what im buying and i know how to take care of my babies.

Never been disappointed as I always knew what to expect for what I spent. It's the games that suck now.

Bla bla bla...

You can "research" all you want - it does not guarantee that you will get a faulty or buggy video card. I've researched enough to buy myself Asus GeFroce GTX560 Ti DirectCU II - it was supposed to be a cool and quiet card. It was nothing like that! It was one of the loudest cards i ever had. This thread is about sharing fun memories about unexpected video cards and their behaviors, and not for dull statements "do research before buying". It does not work this way in life guys.

This is what i am talking about:

Oh yes I had a disappointment I already had forgotten almost. Right before I got this 780 Ti used from a friend I had bought myself a R9 380 Armor from MSI. Card looked good, 2 nice fans and nice beefy pcb and all but it wasn't even functioning one single time. Straight fail

 

[Kanan]

Oh yes I had a disappointment I already had forgotten almost. Right before I got this 780 Ti used from a friend I had bought myself a R9 380 Armor from MSI. Card looked good, 2 nice fans and nice beefy pcb and all but it wasn't even functioning one single time. Straight fail. I sent it back for a refund, asked my friend if he's still selling his 780 Ti and he quickly agreed with me to take it off eBay and sell it to me instead for a nice price. Best coincidence ever.

 

[P4-630]

Where is @Cvrk , I'm sure he wants to say something here.....

 

[TheMailMan78]

2900XT. 500 bucks I spent and I still haz a sad.

In contrast one of the best cards I had was a 5850. Thing was better than two 4850's in SLI.

 

[silentbogo]

I had my share of bad cards too.
My worst card was an MX440, which I bought for my very first college PC....

Few years later I bought a pre-built PC with ATI X200 on board. All I needed is a good cheap workstation which can also do multimedia, and ended up with a piece of crap CompaQ which also had no PCIe or AGP slot in case I wanted to upgrade it.
So much for listening to the store rep...

The most disappointing though was the HD3870. I bought it on my birthday and then received an HD3850 as a present.
At the time I was aware that the spec is almost the same, but I did not expect that HD3850 could overclock a higher than its older brother, without even a slightest bump in the voltage....
I know... luck of a draw... blah-blah... but still it was the most bitter memory about videocards - returning that HIS 3870 back to the store the next day, 'cause the cheaper option was better.
On the positive side - I've exchanged it for the exact same HD3850 to complete a nice overclocked xfire (second card also overclocked as good as the first one, and showed no problems whatsoever)!

2900XT. 500 bucks I spent and I still haz a sad.

That's one helluva turbocharged paperweight. Had a Sapphire 2900XT for a short while.... that reference turbine almost made me deaf for the rest of my life.

 

[jboydgolfer]

BFG was a company that went out of business somewhere around 2005. 95% of their business was GPU's and the rest was specialized motherboards, such as the various NForce ones.

I actually still had one of their posters or some kind of promotional advertisement they came in a video card box with the video card a year ago or so I was going through my old components & found it .there is also a do not disturb door knob hanger

 

[ISI300]

Here goes nothing (in the order of appearance):
1. Gainward FX 5200, shockingly bad, came with my first pre-built PC, low-end and based on Nvidia's notorious FX series. Two strikes you're out.
2. Geforce 4 MX-440. Maker unknown. 128-bit. faster than #1 in most cases but lacked vertex shaders.
3. Inno3D 9600 GT. Not bad per-se, but had the worst cooler ever installed on any graphics card.
4. EVGA GTX 460 External Exhaust. Terribly ineffective and noisy cooler, no VRM cooling meant that VRMs melted.

There's also been a ton of others that have been great.

 

[yotano211]

The one I hate the most was the Nvdia 8600m gt on my 1st laptop. I bought the laptop without searching anything, I found out that it had gddr2 memory when other laptops had gddr3 memory. It made it worst that 2 months later I could have bought a laptop with a 8800m gts for about $150 more which was over twice as fast.
Had to stick with that laptop for 4 years since I cash poor. Today I can just upgrade every 2 years without worrying about money but I know research every laptop purchase.