easymode

A lot of us have had a lot of different computers over the years. I find that when a lot of folks have a fondness for particular systems or component, that fondness is usually directed at CPUs and GPUs...when I think of the rig I first built myself, I don't think of the motherboard or the PSU. Sure, those powered the computer, but the processor and graphics card are where it's at. That's where the magic happens, at least for the most part... Anyway, I was musing over this while I ate lunch today and it got me thinking about parts I have an emotional attachment to. The one that immediately sprang to mind is the 1050 ti. Tt wasn't my first discrete GPU, but it was a little powerhouse that didn't need any external power. I absolutely adored that thing and kept using it for a solid five years. I regret giving it away and would happily chuck it into a second system if I still had it. I played a lot of my favorite games at high settings for the first time on that card.

So, what are some graphics cards you loved or used back in the day that you look back on with fondness?

The 1050ti is also a special one for me. I ended up buying 4 of them, 1 was for my Plex server to handle transcoding and then 3 were to throw into some old Dell Optiplex PCs that I took from work to make gaming PCs for my nephews.

Sometimes I do still wish I had kept the first GPU I actually bought for the first PC I built. It was HIS HD 7950 IceQ and looked very cool but also got very loud since it was a blower cooler. I ended up getting a 980 from a friend for free and then gave the 7950 to my cousin so he could play Day Z. The could would be useless now, but it'd look neat somewhere on my shelf lol

Has to be 3dfx's Voodoo for me, seeing (and feeling) GLQuake for the first time was unbelievable back then after having everything software rendered.

Funnily enough though I probably prefer the software rendering look these days

750ti for me since that was my first GPU I got when I built my first own rig, I could purchase with my own funds. It was great and just a 2gb card that played so much albeit even if it didn't play at the highest graphics/quality settings, I was very happy with it for what I could afford.

Riva TNT 2 Ultra


This was my first GPU and I played all kinds of old games on it... UT 99 was a big one from this era.

The X1900 XT

This was a huge upgrade... I remember this being one of the first "WTF moments" I had after an upgrade.

Probably the 550TI, it was my first purchased GPU and I later got a second one to try out SLI. It was a surprisingly capable card for a broke college student like myself.

While the second 550TI didn't help with games much it was nice to be able to render a video, 3D model, or some other GPU bound task on the secondary GPU while I gamed on the primary.

It also helped me get three screens for the first time ever which was fantastic.

mega wrote: Apr 28th, '26, 10:03 Has to be 3dfx's Voodoo for me, seeing (and feeling) GLQuake for the first time was unbelievable back then after having everything software rendered.

Funnily enough though I probably prefer the software rendering look these days

It's weird, I have nostalgia for glide, but never actually owned a Voodoo card. I started with the TNT 2 Ultra or whatever and that was it. Now I have a Voodoo 2 and I admit I spend a lot of time looking at the box art from some of these old 3DFX cards... I wish they were still around competing with Nvidia and AMD (and Intel... and the new Chinese GPUs).

The regular 970 for me. Was the first graphics card I bought, saved hard for it (worked a crappy kitchen job at the time) only to find out I could never use the card to it's full potential because of a stupid flaw that only allowed me to use a 3.5gb of the vram which I worked so hard to save every nickel and dime for hahaha :_)

Nothing sentimental exactly, but my old GPU, my EVGA GTX 1080 SC lasted a very long time and is still pretty capable. It now lives in my HTPC.

Deadhand wrote: Apr 30th, '26, 02:30 The regular 970 for me. Was the first graphics card I bought, saved hard for it (worked a crappy kitchen job at the time) only to find out I could never use the card to it's full potential because of a stupid flaw that only allowed me to use a 3.5gb of the vram which I worked so hard to save every nickel and dime for hahaha :_)

yeah it was a shame with the whole 3.5gb 970 thing, I actually chose the 8gb RX 480 over it at the time just due to more memory and I was only on 1080p too.

Sapphire HD 7950 Boost was my first gpu at the time when I finally built a gaming pc at the end of 2012, was the 2nd best AMD gpu at the time behind the 7970, people at the time acted like saving the bit of money with the 7950 Boost (which was a bit better than the regular 7950) was the way smarter choice so I did.

It ended up being finicky at times and possibly had a fault in it, grabbed a regular 2gb 660 cheap and rocked that for awhile (that....I actually found out from some deep diving that the 660/660ti could only use 1.5gb, just back then it didn't make nearly as much news as the 3.5gb 970 stuff)

Got the RX 480 8gb when it was finally in stock in 2016 and used that for 5 years until I got the 3070 in 2021 that I still have, despite the doom and gloom online about more than 8gb vram being needed, it's honestly played anything on 1440p high settings with DLSS that I've cared to try that's modern, and obviously ultra in older games. I bought the ~$5 Lossless Scaling app on steam awhile back to toy around with frame gen to help the card age better. I just genuinely can't justify much for a card these days. I kept hearing stories a year or two ago about people finding super cheap $200 4070/5070's in person at walmarts way marked down for some reason, wished I could have come across one of those deals lol.

If my 3070 died I'd probably try and grab another used at a good price from a good seller online and rock it, I wouldn't be outright against the similar 6700XT, but, I did have my share of driver woes with the RX 480 requiring DDU (the whole process is burned into my mind's memory haha), although I did hear the AMD drivers massively improved a couple years ago starting with the 6000 series