Post fugly/weird graphics cards.
Post fugly/weird graphics cards
Charles Brown
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Ian Gomez
Isaiah Foster
Connor Fisher
pic related, the ugliest reference card design ever
Jason Morales
Alexander Green
>caring what something you'll see 1-2 times a year looks like
Jace Thomas
Ayy
Zachary Hughes
Samuel Peterson
Charles Thomas
ayy lmao
Easton Diaz
lighghgerally
Josiah Hughes
I don't know the specifics of what this is or what it was for
Daniel Myers
passively-cooled FireGL. Meant for workstations and rack servers that have tightly-packed shit but a lot of front-to-back airflow.
Lucas Lewis
Looks like a graphics overlay card to me
Matthew Reyes
SLI: The way it was meant to be played.
Zachary Bennett
OP said ugly??
Dylan Bennett
having a fan that sucked through the heatsink before exhausting directly out the back was a thing in those days.
or weird. (which I'm taking to just mean "unusual")
Grayson Wood
That's a very high end 3dfx voodoo card. The other side contains 8 chips.
John Gray
Quantum 3d AAlchemy of some kind
Love the neat components disposition like in Matrox cards
Jonathan Rogers
World's most minimalist graphics card.
Jonathan Lopez
Yup that's what those cards were indeed, rebranded by Quantum. They came on some dual p3 machines.
Sebastian Morgan
SNSV made this thing with the GPU on the "wrong" side of the board, presumably for passive-cooling purposes.
Hudson Johnson
That's not a GPU though, just an adapter for the onboard crap
The worlds minimalist graphics card are likely those USB ones which let the driver do almost evrything
Zachary Wright
Other side.
Daniel Garcia
Wouldn't even call that a graphics card. Maybe a "display adapter".
Jack Moore
Someone did the same thing at the PCI-AGP transition, too.
Benjamin Evans
makes sense though since heat rises
Angel Martinez
Xavier Evans
broom, broom
youtube.com
Samuel Mitchell
I always wondered why they didn't make PCI-E have components on the opposite side as PCI, so you could have one slot that could take either a PCI or PCI-E card. Like they did with PCI and ISA.
This dual X1600 got built but never brought to market. Meant as a successor to the (underhwelming) rage fury maxx.
Jose Lee
AYYMD
Oliver Kelly
...which looked like this. Always wonder why they used fans on heatsinks with almost no fin area. This thing died a quick death in the marketplace because it was impossible to write a Win2k/XP driver that used both GPUs due to something MS changed in the way the video subsystem worked, compared to 9x.
Brandon Gutierrez
Whole card.
James Johnson
Only FOUR cards?
In FOUR slots?
Try FIVE in ONE!
Ethan Nguyen
how has this not been posted yet
Samuel Moore
S3 ViRGE. Noting special to look at, but a fun story - called "The world's first graphics decelerator" because its 3d features were so slow and limited even for the time (1995-6 or so) that software rendering was faster. This, along with finding the proprietary API of the competing Rendition Verite cards a giant pain in the ass, is why John Carmack embraced OpenGL for Quake and future engines/games in the series.
Despite sucking loads of dicks these cards were pretty common in this era - they were the cheapest thing that could claim to have 3d acceleration, so a bunch of OEMs and white-box shops put them in machines.
Someone actually built the Bitchin Fast 3d? top zozzle
Jonathan Morgan
>buy used 7300GT for peanuts
>test at the store
>well, Win XP boots, assume it works
>come home
>install proper drivers
>run game
>black screen
>background music and menu sounds ok
>just no video
>what the fuck
>dxdiag.exe
>this card effectively can not display 3D
>fuck it, at least 2D video acceleration works fine
>test card on Win98SE box
>games run fine, 3D and all
>use for a few months for playing NFS Underground and Vice City
>card finally dies after heavy artifacting
It was so weird
William Sullivan
This is some card (Obsidian??) where someone bolted a pair of SLId Voodoo 2s to a 2D chipset to make something that normally needed three cards into one.
Chase Rodriguez
Another dual-GPU card that never escaped into the wild.
James Hill
Voodoo 3 2000. Unreal/Unreal Tournament/ Quake 3 all looked pretty sweet on this back in the day.
But kinda related as it deals with graphics the ASrock 939 dual sataII board had a feature called "Surround Display Mode" You could use PCI-E/AGP/PCI graphics cards all for nice surround display action (reg use only though). So 3 cards x 3 outputs per card means 9 total displays.
Angel Perez
GPU with remote access built in
Even allows configuring things like the BIOS remotely without any OS running on the machine
Julian Taylor
αεsthεtic af
Tyler Taylor
IBM Professional Graphics Controller from the XT/AT days. Had 320KB of VRAM, back when most computers had less main memory than that. Also had its own on-board 8088. Cost, in 2018 dollars, well over ten grand. That's before you bought the special monitor for it.
Christian Evans
and believe it or not it was successful enough to be cloned. This "Photon" board couldn't be used in an XT though, only an AT - because the XT case wasn't tall enough.
and now I'm out of weird and interesting graphics cards. Someone else post some stuff.
Parker Ward
How did it handle user input? Did it interpret network commands into input device signals?
Ian Morales
Pretty close to the videoloca
Gabriel Gutierrez
Holy shit it has a display on it. What was it for?
Blake Nguyen
Probably debugging, same as some motherboards have a two-digit POST code indicator, so if they fail to boot, you can tell at what stage they failed.
Austin Hernandez
It probably had a keyboard controller in the same board.
All servers have one of these integrated now, they are called IPMI controllers.
Christopher White
Which card is that? I can see the double 8pin, so I assume it's the 290's uncut brother
Benjamin Perez
Colton Williams
Interesting.
Wyatt Bell
It looks like an angry owl.
>FX5900
Probably still quieter than the leaf blower nVidia designed as the reference cooler.
>peltier coolers
>3DFX cards in SLi
>peice of shit video card at the bottom to handle the 2D and actual output since 3DFX refused to implement it
>doooooooooooooool CPUs
That is peak 90's gaming right there.
>S3
S3 and Aureal were both complete shitmess companies. It's a surprise they managed to turn out actual hardware. Think what you will of Creative lab's litigation, Aureal wouldn't have made it into the 00's no matter what.
Cooper White
I never thought I'd see performance coolers for Slot 1 CPUs haha
Carter Morales
those aren't pelts, they're just golden orbs. and no gamer in the 90s bought dual-CPU server boards - Win9x couldn't see more than one CPU, and even if you had Windows 2000, all games were single-threaded.
Plenty of Linux hobbyists and the 90s version of /hsg/ bought BP6 boards though. Half of that was probably just the joy of pissing off Intel though by running cheap-shit CPUs in SMP.
they made plenty of em. Also for the original Slot A Athlons, which I believe used the same mounting arrangement.
Henry Cox
back then it was all about the CRYSTAL ORBZ coolers
I'm so glad we have the cooling we do now. Cooling back then fucking sucked balls, form over function every time.
Brody Wood
You're right, those are slot CPUs not peltier coolers.
Still, for that era, people still wanted dual CPUs since multicore chips were a long way off. Even in the windows world, you had CD ripping (and eventually DVD ripping). Doing your own video transcoding was still a big thing. Having enough horse power to run Photoshop and other productivity apps before they were loaded down with DRM aids was also a thing.
Logan Kelly
Crystal Orbs were little northbridge/GPU sinks. Successor to the Blue Orb, which was fucking everywhere in those days.
And yeah coolers today work much better, but it is kind of a shame that everything's an identical looking tower cooler.
Dylan Rogers
>any reference card
Owen Adams
The whole modding scene during that era was one rave after another. One person cut and put a plexiglass window on their case. Everybody lost their shit. Another guy put neon lights in his after copying the other guy's window. Everybody lost their shit. One guy was crazy enough to put window on his hard drive. So many drive died with idiots trying to copy that.
Joseph Wilson
One of the biggest meme builds ever
Charles Jackson
and then there was that period around 2003 or so where they started making cases entirely out of clear acrylic and everyone had to have one. I think that was around the time they started making LED fans, too.
Nathaniel Scott
ive been looking for a mini itx case like that for my dank pentium 4 build
Mason Scott
>mini itx
>pentium 4
Austin Morgan
*AyyTI
Austin Smith
socket 478, 2.2ghz northwood p4 on an itox g4v100
William Morales
Fuck. How much did that thing weigh.
Owen Gomez
sorry for these terrible pictures, i have really shaky hands
Eli Davis
You had the ricers and then the extreme coolers. The coolers were going as overboard as possible without resorting to crazy stuff like liquid nitrogen or oil baths. Water cooling rigs were gaining real traction in the market for a while despite the hazards of assembling, testing, and maintaining one. You also had the legendary Vantec Tornado which moved enough CFMs to function as the main prop for a jet engine. It also sounded like one as well at full blast. You also had people lining their cases with sound proofing since their cooling rig made the computer sound like a downed helicopter.
Justin Robinson
Marrox cards have always had a very well designed neat look to them.
Ayden Richardson
Yeah the fury maxx sucked fucking balls.
Leo Hernandez
Get a socket 478 to 479 adapter and overclock a pentium M to ridiculous speeds
Bentley Anderson
>vantec tornado
pls no
this is a 9800XT with a custom cooler on it, the big fucker is a tornado
Joshua Kelly
Tell me about it, I had one for a short time. Luckily replaced it with a TNT soon after.
Leo Martinez
Scary thing is that the Vantec Tornados weren't the most powerful fans you could get. Sidewinder used to sell Deltas that moved more air and were even louder. I bought one back in 2006 or so, a 120x38mm TFB. Thing sucked down three amps of 12v and moved 220CFM. I still have it somewhere.
The thing I really miss were the Thermoflows - there was a little thermistor in the hub sticking out into the airflow, and the fan adjusted its own speed based on the temperature of the air it was sucking in, no PWN or controller needed. Great for replacing dead PSU fans. They don't seem to make fans with this feature anymore. Some fuckwad probably patented it and won't let anyone else do it.
Colton Long
>Thermoflows
Sounds cool but they were probably considered obsolete by oems since most hardware designers were integrating automated thermal management that spun dumb fans up or down for you.
I do miss the non-standard heat sink aftermarket. Those little fans cheap manufacturers used to cool north bridges would turn into screamers from the dust after three months. The only fix was to clean it, open it up, and lube it. Replacing it with a quiet chunk of metal made the machine so much quieter.
Nicholas Robinson
They were unironically pretty good, especially for their low price
Carmack's review of 3d cards before the voodoo was released only considered the intergraph realizm an usable card, and that one cost a few grand
Evan Lopez
Mason Martin
William Green
passive cooled cards + very low speed fans were the best combo. had a 8600 GTS passive, added a fan on top, it was a beast. the card still sucked, but it was ice cold.
Lucas Watson
> old /pcmr/ build
Zachary Sanders
>It looks like an angry owl.
hmmm ASUS could build a similar STRIX cooler card? would be cool... ?
Evan Green
It's a card long enough to use as a skateboard. Is that both a IDE and SCSI port on that thing?
Hudson Anderson
They are connectors for an optional geometry board
Also not how the cards memory can be expanded with normal SDRAM
Angel Myers
Looks more like a remote access card. Basically a small server within a server to access it if the main system is down. Still make them but they are tiny as shit now.
James Howard
Angel Morales
>Also note how the cards memory can be expanded with normal SDRAM
I did. It wasn't unusual for add-in board to have slots for additional memory. A lot of RAID boards of that era had ram slots. It wasn't until video cards really did start using LMNOP ram that any attempt user expansion stopped.
Easton Parker
the era-appropriate case you want is probably a Travla C138 as used in this
images10.newegg.com
Xavier Anderson
Apple 8*24GC with an AMD chip providing acceleration and whatnot.
Oliver Brooks
i was either going to go with something really era appropriate, or do an inverted sleeper and put it in a phanteks enthoo evolv itx
with one of those NZXT GPU coolers, some fancy corsair fans, hardline water cooling and all that shit.
But then its a p4 and a geforce 6200 under the glitter
also i want one of those ultrax connect power supplies
Carson Powell
David King
The frogposter GPU
Hunter Williams
Someone post rule 34 of the ATI girl. What was her name, Ruby?
Gavin Garcia
I wonder which company started using the usually-blank shroud on video cards for shitty 3d-rendered graphics.
Kayden Garcia
These made sense at the time.
theverge.com
videocardboxart.blogspot.com
Oliver Carter
Gabriel Gomez
The answer to that is shrouded in the mists of time my friend. Such shitty graphics have appeared on cards since at least the 90s. I always wondered too, why? Why??
Mason Stewart
Matrox millennium
Has a directx 1.0 driver even though the card doesn't support textures at all
Ian Morgan
Looks like Lorax face
Carter Campbell
>Includes Mechwarrior 2
If you ever attempted to play any of those special MW builds off of their target hardware, they would glitch out on you eventually.