beepfish wrote:

It was another really popular cheapo card. It was one of the first chips to bring the top end features to the bottom. Whether the features were worthless or not doesn't matter to the OEMs or even many upgrade customers apparently. You can see the same thing today with the low-end DX10 and 11 cards and IGPs.

Have to admit that back then I bought an FX5200 AGP thinking it would be better than the MX440 PCI I had sold - all that gobbledegook on the box, the fact that 5 is a bigger number than 4, and the logic that "surely the latest chips will be better than what went before"; may even have been a dx9 game I wanted to play. Little did I know I would spend a year scratching my head marvelling at the crap performance. On the plus side, that experience prompted me to take more interest in understanding what I was buying in future 🤣.

It was the start of the DX9 era and the abysmal performance of the FX cards that really got me more interested in knowing more about the cards, too. That was why when I upgraded to a new motherboard with AGP I went with a Radeon 9500 instead of an FX. The 6x00 cards competed better against the X800/X850 so nVidia did manage to make a comeback there but I think they lost it again until the 8x00 cards came out. The whole 7x00 generation seemed to lose it's way against the likes of the X1800 and X1900. The 8800GTX was simply amazing in it's time and I'd still consider one today for a low end system. I like them better than the HD2x00 cards. Nvidia stayed ahead through the GeForce9x00/HD3x00 era for the most part but I thought they started to weaken during the HD4x00, 2x0GTS/GTX period and now ATi is back on top again having sold more DX11 cards than Nvidia.

8800GTX may be old but it is more than capable of chewing up games even today. I put mine in my TVPC that runs 1360x768 and it runs a lot of very new games extremely well. DIRT 2 runs a fairly solid 60fps at ultra quality with 16X CSAA!! I'm thinking I will perhaps hold out on a new card until the new consoles come out and make it worthwhile. The consoles are retro technology anchors today because of how every game is multiplatform.

Yup GeForce FX had a curious architecture. Curious and kinda stupid apparently because ATI creamed them. The article makes it fairly apparent that the design was fundamentally poor because it didn't leverage parallelism well at all. With NV40 they essentially admitted their mistakes by going massively parallel.

Oh yes the 8800gtx is probably one of the best cards ever. It's been like 3 and a half years and it can still play every game on mostly Highest options!

Also I gotta say that my 5600 XT and my system in general put me in the bandwagon for how pcs work. That's how I started learning about the internals. It really pissed me off that I could only play HL2 with DirectX 8.1 mode.

F2bnp wrote:

Oh yes the 8800gtx is probably one of the best cards ever. It's been like 3 and a half years and it can still play every game on mostly Highest options!

Also I gotta say that my 5600 XT and my system in general put me in the bandwagon for how pcs work. That's how I started learning about the internals. It really pissed me off that I could only play HL2 with DirectX 8.1 mode.

I'm really surprised, though, how much people are still asking for them. The GTS 250 is just a 9800GTX+ that uses less power and puts out less heat and you can get one of those for less than some people are asking for an 8800GTX. I think some people need to wake up to the fact that many of todays low end cards are better than their formally high end card and start repricing them accordingly.

If the demand is there for high prices on 8800GTX, then by all means the sellers should reap the rewards. 😁

Old high end cards tend to go for relatively high prices.

True, though personally I'd rather go for an old mid-range as that only has advantages: Produces less heat, more common (and thus cheaper) to find and more often are cooled passively or atleast more silent.
And for some reason I think the high-end cards are more prone to suddenly die because they tend to be engineered more towards their thermal limits.

The renamed 9800GT is even available as a passive card. I have it in my main rig for a year now and have since frequently forgotten to turn of the machine since it became basically silent. No probs with games yet - but who am I to judge.