With old hardware it's hard to say that buying brand X you never run into trouble as components degrade over time no matter who made them. That being said, XFX, Sapphire and EVGA are usually recommended over other brands and they might use better parts for their cards (maybe faster memory too). Then again, my first GeForce card was a cheap PowerColor and it still works just fine.

I just recently bought cheap powercolor graphics card on ebay. It hasn't arrived yet, but afterwards I wondered if it was cheap because powercolor brand is low quality.
That is why I started this thread because I realised I didn't know enough about manufacturers to know if I should avoid some manufacturers and if I should avoid some of them.

Well, the GF 256 that I bought back in -00 used SDRAM instead of the faster (and more expensive) DDR and many people opted for the cheaper card. Even if it wasn't as fast it was still faster than most (all?) of the rivals. I think more depends on the actual model and what kind of performance you expect from it. There are certain "preferred choice" cards for certain era builds because of their speed, price and quality. It doesn't mean you have to get the most expensive card if the cheaper one runs the games as well. You can find most top tier ATI/Nvidia cards from -00 onwards for pennies if you look around.

Powercolor it was a good brand in the past, like Gecube.

Poor quality from Palit cards.

It's also about intended purpose. I'd favor models built for professional reliability over gamer gear that was to be obsolete the next summer. Also by the way look for models where the manufacturer was aiming to prove itself or the tech and overengineered.

hwswITA wrote:

Powercolor it was a good brand in the past, like Gecube.

Poor quality from Palit cards.

I was surprised I got Powercolor radeon x850XT PE for 20 euros on ebay. That is why I suspected that powercolor cards might not be such good quality.
I do have one palit card. it is Geforce 7800gs. It still works surprisingly.

I usually look for old reviews, they tell me if a card can be overclocked or if it already runs maxed out.
Going for specific manufacturers is useless.

Because of this I got a Gainward Geforce 4 Ti 4800 SE that can run at a higher clockspeed than a regular 4800 non-SE card:
http://www.legitreviews.com/gainward-ti4800se_7

Before buying new hardware I always run a google search with "site:vogons.org" to see if someone wrote about it here, too.
Has helped me loads in avoiding bad hardware.

The main difference on older cards are the coolers each company used. I like XFX but also have other brands like BFG etc. These days any card that still works (10+ years old) should be fine to snag depending on cost.

Depend from brand to brand. But as far as i can see the old Gigabyte cards seems really well made, i have a couple of Gigabyte Radeon 9000 and they are with high quality on them the caps are polimere, also they look better when you look at them. The ASUS cards also tempt to have better japan caps on them and better PCB, as some of their motherboards i know that from ASUS Radeon 9550 great quality ASUS Radeon 9800 Pro and ASUS GEforce 2 MX 400 all have japan caps...
Old Palit cards and some of the new ones seems to use also japan capacitors so that will be good quality. Diamond cards and Creative cards on the more old years have also higher quality, MatroX cards too. Also many Compaq parts are OEM but they are very well build. MSI video cards also are very well made i have some of them for example MSI GEforce FX5950 Ultra and the card is more then solid good caps, good cooler. The MSI Radeon x1950 Pro also is very well build, and Medion Radeon 9800XXL (this is MSI) japan capacitors and good cooler on it..

Now for the coolers is different that if a card is build quality and have japan caps and good PCB and other components, does not mean it will be great when it comes to cooling solution, so depend on the exact model you need to see reviews about some card. For example the Sapphire cards from X1xxx series like x1950 up to Radeon HD3xxx series the cooler is total crap just never buy one of these. While in the same time the HIS cards have great coolers and build quality, this is why i choose them for my AGP Radeon cards when i can find them over Sapphire...

Same goes for motherboards..

MSI is interesting, as they have ups and downs, at some point they have great and very solid quality build videocards and motherboards, in the next time they have junk...
In the 90`s MSI quality was junk specially the link to the feature products, but after they did go up like 4 years after they did start to make really nice card and boards, and after that some junk, no idea why is that..
ASUS is known from many people to be great motherboard brand, but that was not every time the case. While ASUS did have the top model for slot 1 the P3B-F that is undisputed king there, they did have later on junk boards for example the whole line of ASUS socket 462 board was total trash, and not only i think till ASUS start to make the ROG branding (at least for AMD) the AMD board from ASUS before ROG was trash most of the time, not very well made and they did die for no reason. Also for intel there was better boards in the face of ABIT in socket 478 era, specially the ABIT with all japan caps was way better then the ASUS offers, also the LanParty was way better to then the ASUS one..
Gigabyte also did have great quality on the motherboards, DUAL bios feature since Slot 1 platform, most of the time japan caps specially on the VRM part. You can look for ABIT boards too, but mostly after the NF7 V2 the orange ones, as after that board ABIT did start to use only japan capacitors, while before that they was using garbage ones, and did need recapping of the whole mobo...

Would you consider this to be good quality graphics card?
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Power … n_X850XT_PE.jpg

Seems this way, the old Power Color cards tend to be well build. That does not seems the case for the present PC cards or the pas tones like Radeon HD7xxx series. But the old ones like this one seems solid as far as i can tell.

With older stuff I have found Number Nine cards to be of excellent quality, both build & image quality & performance. They are one sure way of getting a good S3 based card, that can be a real hit and miss affair with other brands.

I was impressed with the quality of a VisionTek HD2600XT AGP card that I bought a couple years ago. It has a substantial heatsink on both sides of the card which seems to be better than what I've seen in photos of competing cards. The caps are also good. It uses a mixture of Japanese solid polymer caps and some Japanese brand liquid electrolytics.

It seemed that the heatsink might have also been meant to cool the Express->AGP bridge chip. It comes very close but doesn't quite touch it. Not sure if they meant it to make contact, but if they did then they failed to get the clearances right. This is disappointing, but no worse than competing cards which typically don't have a heatsink in that area at all.

The auxiliary power connector is a modern 6-pin, not the 4-pin molex that most competing HD2600XT AGP cards use. The 6-pin safely supports more current than a 4-pin molex. It comes with the cost of being less convenient for people with older power supplies and requiring them to include an adapter in the box. I like the fact that in spite of those marketing/cost concerns, they still made the choice to use the 6-pin.

Of course, that's just one model of card. I don't know if other VisionTek cards are this good, but this example impressed me.

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I had a bad experience with a Gigabyte HD4350 (bought new). I don't know whether the blame lies with Gigabyte or ATI. It was a factory overclocked card, which is something I'm a bit leery of. In games it seemed that there would always be a flickering surface *somewhere*. It was just a matter of looking around and finding it. Sometimes it would be something tiny. Other times it would be an entire wall. It was kind of like living in one of those Star Trek episodes where they look around and find glitches in the holodeck.

Playing around with drivers didn't fix it. I couldn't underclock the card to ATI standard clocks because this screwed up something with my dual monitor desktop (I don't remember the details). IIRC the underclock didn't resolve the issue in games anyway, but it was a long time ago so my memory is foggy. I just know that in the end I never found a good solution.
This issue might not have been indicative of other Gigabyte cards. But combined with my experience with 3 new Gigabyte motherboards around the same time (which all had different random problems), it led me to not trust Gigabyte anymore.

Baoran wrote:

Would you consider this to be good quality graphics card?
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Power … n_X850XT_PE.jpg

The capacitors look like Sanyo and Nippon polymers, which are very reliable. However, the picture isn't quite detailed enough to be totally certain.
I don't know how the cooling compares to other X850XT cards, or how reliable their fans are.

Like capacitors, fans are another common failure point for graphics cards. I don't know any way to guess the fan quality other than by searching for anecdotes. You can't see what brand of fan graphics cards are using unless you are lucky enough to find pictures of somebody taking one apart. Now that Photobucket has died, half of the old teardown pictures on the internet are 404.