Not the Radeon 9xxx, they look well built and they are but they still often fail.

I would look at Fire GL or Quado cards when it comes to AGP, they are mostly the same as the gaming cards but with more conservative clock speeds.
ELSA Gloria III Quadro2 Pro (Geforce 2) gets my vote! I think it will last for a long long time. Its basicly the same as the green Geforce 2 Ultra except for lower clocks and DVI support.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/opengl-wo … ower,334-3.html

Crazy to read that the card sold for $1000.

Skyscraper wrote:

Not the Radeon 9xxx, they look well build and they are but they still often fail. […]
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Not the Radeon 9xxx, they look well build and they are but they still often fail.

I would look at Fire GL or Quado cards when it comes to AGP, they are mostly the same as the gaming cards but with more conservative clock speeds.
ELSA Gloria III Quadro2 Pro (Geforce 2) gets my vote! I think it will last for a long long time. Its basicly the same as the green Geforce 2 Ultra except for lower clocks and DVI support.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/opengl-wo … ower,334-3.html

I think that the R300 was indeed quiet complex for its generation.
I would also add the Matrox Parhelia as nicely built and with good layout.

Yes, I would say that Matrox cards are all built extremely well.
ATi are very good as well. Even the early ones (CGA/Hercules) have quite a high level of integration. Much smaller and simpler than the IBM ones.
Cards built by Diamond are also often very nice. VLB cards may be somewhat weird, since the cards are often much larger than what the components require.
Eg I have this SpeedStar Pro (I think this is a Cirrus Logic reference design):

They could just as easily have fit all the components on an ISA card, but well, they need that long VLB connector. It's interesting how they chose to start to layout the components from the back of the card. This means the chip is close to the high-frequency signals of the VLB bus, and the analog output components are as far removed from the chip/bus as possible.

Nice card! I got a GD5429 but low profile (I don't like these so much...). Certainly on the ISA the ATi Mach64 2Mb are really great on the layout.

from my impression cards from ELSA, Number Nine, DSystems and miro are built quite well.

I'd like to throw STB and Hercules in there too (at least their older stuff is good). Orchid also seems solid.