Hard to believe but my noobest thing was to buy Geforce 4 MX 4000 and think it will play generals on high :wanker: so old times...
I got to go with the 9500-9800 line and the HD 5000 line of cards. The first line of ATI Direct X 9 cards offered the best bang for the buck and walked all over Nvidias offerings. The 9800 Pro could be flashed to a XT easily, and there was some nice coolers out on the market too for the cards. The current 5000 line is basically in the same situation offering great performance for the money spent. Even more so if you shop around. Back at the beginning of summer I got my two 5770 cards new retail, and the total for both together came out to be about $230 shipped or so from some newegg reseller guy on ebay. I do got to give honorable mention to the HD3850 cards too. Those cards still offer decent performance even today considering how old they are. My son and daughter are using my old 3850 cards in their systems, and running pretty much anything I run at perfectly playable speeds with good visual quality.
I went the other way....9600XT to FX5700LE. I tried to upgrade from 9200LE to 9600XT....ended up with 2 DOA 9600XTs (1 Visiontek, 1 ATI). Only reason I initially deviated from ATI.
I also like the models which poke Nvidia and say "Check this out!". -9000 -4000 -5000 Those old X800s were fair stick in the day, I heard. That was during my console era, so I have zero idea other than what I vaguely remember from the LAN down the street.
X850PE were amazing card, only cons was lack of PS3 support which isn't bad, although in long term some games demand use of it, nothing major though.
Going from the worst buy ever (Radeon HD 4650, somehow I thought I had bought mid-range there) to a Radeon HD 4770 made me love that card. I also liked the really weak Radeon HD 2400 PRO, because I could play LOTR-BFMEII (abbreviations are fun!) at high settings on my 1280x1024 monitor. ^^ I'd imagine if I'd have played more gfx intensive games at the time it'd been horrible though, but compared to the internal crap the PC came with it made a clear difference.
Legend card is X1950 PRO/XTX ,great graphic card with amazing performance,now this same we have with HD 4850/HD 5850 ,great performance and low costs.
That is the amazing thing, the HD5850 costs the same over a year and month, i don't recall any card that cost didn't changed in a year. Yet the performance barely went down, amazing card nothing else matters.
it changed, but it went upper and then lower. At least in spain, 5850 costed 240€ and now its at 230€. But has been at almost 300€. anyways its a great buy if you got it @ 240€ at the start imo. Im looking for its rumoured-rebrand xP or 460 plus fullHD monitor (currently 1280x1024) >_<. Lets see what the 6xxx delivers.
The 5850 was priced around $250 for a few weeks during late Q1 and early Q2 at Newegg before Nvidia strangled ATI's 40nm supply by placing a massive order of 40nm chips with TSMC.
Still in terms of pure technology. HD5850 is the best card. Watt/Performance/$. Actually i believe HD5850 has highest performance/watt ratio in the history. Which makes it the best card ever made ^^
5970 I say my 5970 is the best ATI card I've ever had I know some people have had problems but I have never had a single one, a single card with 2 GPU's running at 1Ghz, thats what I'm talking about Xfire'd with a 5870 is the way to go
Quite some power you got there. But let's not talk about personal subjective opinion. One can say HD2900 was the best or x800 or HD4890. Let's talk about technological point of view, thats what really matters. Who would argue that HD5850 was , again , technologically speaking the best card ? Highest performance/watt in the history of computing (GPU).