Most worthless 600 video card of all time...

[Santilli]

The award goes to the Mac version of the Voodoo 5500.
It hardly runs any games, and, despite very nice visual quality, it's lack of the most basic stuff running on it makes it my candidate, and award, of the worst money I've spent on a video card, and, I only paid 50 dollars...

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[Onomatopoeic]

That's about as bad as someone complaining about the fact that their $249999.99 IBM 360 mainframe is nowhere near as fast as their $249 no-name Taiwanese K6-III clone. It's a long-known fact that "early adopters" of a product line always pay heavily for R&D costs.

Simplify your life, take that Voodoodoo 5500 out in the backyard and bury it.

 

[Pradeep]

I spent around $500 bucks on a video card once, a Viper PCI video card, cutting edge 2MB VRAM and the new-fandangled PCI bus.

Made my Pentium66 with FuzzyMath(tm) scream.

 

[Santilli]

I paid something like 50 bucks for it, and, with a PC monitor, it works fine for the little I do with macs, and gives great graphics. I just hate to think how I would have felt if I had bought it new and retail, first release.
I'm rarely THAT stupid...

I was just reminded about it, since I hooked it up at work to a 21 inch apple monitor, through an adapter, and Tomb Raider wouldn't play, even though it looks great on the imac next to it, with the same processor, and onboard video.
I had to go onboard video to get anything to run on it that requires graphics. Mavis Beacon, etc.

I think Unreal was the only game well for...

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[Mercutio]

I bought a 4MB Hercules ET4000 ISA card in 1993. $500, but I could use a display at 1024x786x32bit color about three years before just about anyone else.

I really wish that I could still use my Voodoo 5500 or for that matter my Voodoo 3000s. They are great for 2D display. A mere half-step below Matrox. But they are AGP 2x-only cards and therefore useless on anything newer.

Worst purchase I ever made was IIRC a Geforce2 GTS. It was a top-of-the-line premium card with a $.03 fan on it. So unstable I'm surprised the delivery truck that brought it didn't crash. After moderately bad experiences with an original Geforce card and SEVERAL bad experiences with Riva 128s and TNTs, I finally decided that nvidia just hates its customers.

 

[P5-133XL]

The worst video investment I made was being an early adobter of Nvidia's TNT2. I did extensive review research with only positive results. After I bought the card did I find out that they has serious problems with virtually all motherboards: When used in games, they pulled too much current through the AGP interface and many motherboards couldn't deal with it. Mind you that the card was within the secifications, it was the MB manufacturers that hadn't designed for a card that would pull that much current. Within 6 months, they had all revised their boards to compensate, but that didn't help me...

What really made me angry was that there was not a single review site that mentioned the problem. One of the primary reasons to do such research is to weed out basic problems like this and it is an obligation, in my mind, for them to report such basic incompatibilites. It does not matter how fast the card, if it won't work...

 

[Computer Generated Baby]

As far as add-in graphics cards go, at work, we paid somewhere under the US$1295 (each) list price for a few Matrox Impression VLB video cards.

This was well before the existence of AGP or PCI when all you had (on X86 PCs) was VLB (VESA Local Bus, 32-bit), EISA (32-bit), and ISA (16-bit AT and/or 8-bit XT).

The Impression could do 1024x768 @ 24-bit, 1280x1024 @ 16-bit, and 1600x1200 @ 8-bit. That was 1990.

Before that, I used AT&T Truevision TARGA and VISTA graphics cards, but these were mainly for video and still-frame video. Those could cost as much as $5000 -- depending on how much expensive V-RAM you needed (the VISTA card allowed for V-RAM and an extension of D-RAM beyond 4 MB all the way up to 16 MB). That was going back to the mid-to-late 1980s.

Then, before that, I've worked with what were essntially workstations wrapped around a frame buffer, namely: Apollo/Domain, Silicon Graphics, MassComp, Evans & Sutherland, Stellar, Ardent, Stardent, CDC, AT&T, IPI, and some others that I'm sure few have heard of before. The prices for this stuff was rather formidable. A typical nVidia card of today can kill any of these at 3D.

 

[Santilli]

Splash:

This brings to mind the 1994 purchase of 32mb of ram, for a 4000 dollar Apple Powerbook 540C, for 1200 dollars.
A year later, it was less then 200 dollars, and, my girlfriend that worked at Hitachi Ram in South SF, was looking for another job,...
No raises that year. 4 billion dollar a year company, to less then 2 billion a year, in less then 12 months...
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