Do you remember your most disappointing video card ever?

[FordGT90Concept]

GeForce4 MX* 440

*Mortiferous eXperience

 

[oinkypig]

the GTX 280 replaced with x1800xt by AMD

 

[Kanan]

My first ever GPU I ever had (hardly to call a GPU anyway it was more like a simple video card) was the ATI Rage II+ with 2MB SD Ram, and it was supposed to be a "3D card" but it performed absolutely worse once you used OpenGL or Direct3D with it - and not only that, the picture also just looked bad then. So I was down to play Half Life with 2D graphics aside from that the card was fine as a simple video card used for 2D stuff, but wow that was disappointing! After that I never had a bad GPU again, too well informed and yeah that one was given me by my dad anyway so not really my fault anyway my first actual "GPU" then I bought myself, was the GeForce 256 and it was great!

 

[Countryside]

In my case, all of this was before Amazon and good Newegg reviews and our only source of info on these cards were whatever the dude at the computer shop said!

"Whatever the dude at the computer shop said"

Reminds me of an video of a man who buys a pc from the shop and the seller says this is the best pc at the moment so the man goes home and then sees a commercial that says a new version of the pc was just released
so he goes back to the shop and buys the newer version goes home and there is that commercial again and he goes back to the shop.

 

[Kanan]

I read PC magazines a lot before the internet era with reviews and YouTube videos and shit. "What the guy in the shop said", well he is a seller he would also want to sell you shit if possible

 

[dorsetknob]

I read PC magazines a lot before the internet era with reviews

I'm a fast Reader
i also read the mags ( for Free of course ) sometimes had to visit several shops to finish the magazine's
This was before they started to shrink wrap them

 

[Kanan]

I'm a fast Reader
i also read the mags ( for Free of course ) sometimes had to visit several shops to finish the magazine's
This was before they started to shrink wrap them

I had a abonement for famous german magazine "GameStar" for many years, my father paid it. Yeah it was nice... they had just the essential amount of game hardware reviews and that was about enough to know what to buy and what not.

 

[FreedomEclipse]

The FX 5200 I used to have was good for anything on par with CS:Source lol

My friend had a Passive version of one of these cards. I managed to take the cooler off my dead 9700pro and fit it to the FX5200 and got some crazy OC out of it

I cant quite remember the kind of frequencies i got but I dont think i had many problems playing games like farcry on 1024x768 or games like BF1942 with the max numbers of bots at the highest graphical setting

 

[TheRagnarok]

For me it would have to be an XFX 7600 GS Passive AGP for my Pentium II Gateway but it only had PCI slots. I Returned it to Sams Club immediately.
Had little access to the internet at the time and knew nothing about AGP, PCI-E
Anyways, I took that money and put it down on my first and last OEM Compaq with a Sempron 3200, 256mb, 80gb Hdd.
It had a full length PCI-E 16x gen1 and two gen 1 SATA ports! Been building my own ever since.

 

[Toothless]

Well.. I'd say my HD8400 that's stuck in my 5350 is pretty bad.. I know it's an APU but good Lord it can't even do LoL decently at 1600x900.

Other than that it's gotta be my 780s due to how loud they were.

 

[cdawall]

I didn't really have one. The only card that gave disappointing performance to me was my dad's (this should show age) PNY FX5700 128MB VIVO and even then it was a beast overclocker.

 

[MrGenius]

The BFG 6800 Ultra OC AGP. It didn't OC for shit. And the VRAM crapped out eventually @ stock volts and a weak-ass 37.5MHz OC. Though it did hold up for quite a while with that OC(more than 5 years). Not too disappointing performance wise really. It still managed some fairly impressive FPS with minimal OC.

 

[Jetster]

FX5200 then the HD6870

 

[Melvis]

I guess my last AMD cards where the most disappointing, my two MSI 280X Gaming. Great performance, but heat was an issue and more then anything else the Drivers where a massive issue for me, over 10 driver updates and they all broke crossfire, very sad. Also two of the same card had died under warranty. Apart from those cards, the 3850/4850/4870X2 X2/7930's all great cards but the 7930's needed a better cooler, they over heated alot.

 

[Frick]

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.

Same here.

I too had the 2600XT and it was great. I got it really cheap and it performed exactly as I expected it to.

 

[Divide Overflow]

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 PC graphics. Nobody knew which software solution was going to take off, Direct Draw, OpenGL, Glide API, Direct 3D and eventually DirectX were all new and different vendors had widely different support and performance on each. The real salt in the wound was the much better performing alternatives that were released soon after from ATI and Nvidia.

 

[alucasa]

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

 

[TheLostSwede]

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.

The third PC has onboard S3 graphics with 1MB of graphics memory, but the upgrade I bought to 2MB did't work, which was disappointing as well. S3 was pretty shit at anything that wasn't 2D though.

After that I got better at understanding computers and stopped buying crappy things and I can't say I've been really disappointed since.

I guess it helps that I was actually doing the reviews for at least one of the big computer magazines a few years later as well, since then you really knew what was good, especially after a 30 card group test with every brand under the sun. I miss those days sometimes...

 

[lagginswag]

Abolutely either visiontek geforce 2 mx400 (but at least it did play cs 1.3 at the time) or bfg geforce 8400 gs pci. I thought i fried the slot as well as the card that was in it at the time (gainward geforce fx 5950 ultra that overheated and died) and i never had another agp card around to test it. Later on another s*** card was radeon hd 5550 ddr2, lol. Works for an htpc now pretty well though.

^relevant lol

 

[Frick]

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

Not all of them, but most of them. I mean yeah they did all suck, but for office PC's at the time they were enough.

 

[CounterZeus]

I guess I have to say my XFX 9600GT. It was a version where the amount of shaders were reduced (48 vs 64). It was not advertised on the shop's website.
Didn't really matter that much though, was held back by the CPU (pentium D 830 with slight OC to 3.2GHz) anyway. Afterwards, I kept it alongside a 560Ti, to use extra monitors

Second place is for a card that I both loved and hated, my mobile X1900. Card itself was superb (shader count was higher than desktop X1900, was based on X1950), but ati dropped support after less than half a year after the purchase.

 

[Rowsol]

My first computer was bought used from an acquaintance for $200. It ran WoW fine enough but the fan was broken and the computer would overheat so I used a desk fan and removed the side panel. Good times. No idea what model it was. The next computer was new with a 7800gt which was far faster so there's a ballpark estimate.

 

[phanbuey]

GeForce4 MX* 440

*Mortiferous eXperience

oh my god that card... it would crash my system, I thought my OC was unstable since I just started (again) in computers. That thing was awful.

I bought it because I thought it could play half life 2... it was promptly replaced by a radeon 9550.

 

[Readlight]

My first Nvidia gf 8400gs 256mb died whit visual artifacts 8years ago.

 

[Komshija]

The most disappointing was Sapphire X1950Pro. Performance wise, it was very good. Aside from that, I had constant problems with this Sapphire, from overheating, PC refusing to start while GPU fans were spinning at 100% to system crashes under GPU load for no obvious reason. I RMA'd for another (new) Sapphire X1950Pro and got the same problems but to a lesser extent.