I ran a Pentium D system with 3GB ram and a 3GB Radeon R9 280x for a few months before getting a new motherboard. The Radeon was certainly being held back, but it worked fine!

I had an opteron 180 with 1gb ddr ram and a geforce 9500gt with 1gb ddr3 vram (later and for a short time, a gtx 550ti). Its pretty sad to know that your graphics card has more bandwidth than the rest of your system. But ultimante386's 280x just runs laps around the pentium D 🤣

My first retro PC was even more amusing: 386SX-40, 2Mb RAM, 512K VRAM and 4Mb Audio ROM compressed to fit two 1MB chips (Orchid SW32). So my sound card actually had more memory than the rest of the system 😀

^^ Come to think of it my P233 workstation has a 32MB AWE64, 8MB GUS PnP, 12MB Voodoo2 & 4MB S3 Virge. There is probably some cache RAM on the SCSI card too but I don't know how much. Doesn't *quite* match its 64MB system RAM but getting close. 😉

Dropcik wrote:

Its pretty sad to know that your graphics card has more bandwidth than the rest of your system.

No, the other way around would be sad.

Sempron 2800+ 64 1,6Ghz @ ~2,2Ghz w/256Kb L2, with 1Gb Ram and GeForce 9500GT 1Gb Ram, served my well for long time.

(Fallout 3, New Vegas, Oblivion, Deadspace, Stalker... and and and..)

For a good, long while I ran a Pentium Dual-Core E2200, 2GB RAM and a GeForce GT610 with 2GB VRAM.