What video card has served you the longest before upgrading?

Probably my 4890 which I used for almost three years before upgrading to a 7850 and then a second 7850.
 
BiH115 said:
What's "just about max". Also what games? :confused:
Click to expand...

'max' would be short for 'maximum', so the highest settings. Slightly lowering AA and Physx allows for ~60 FPS gameplay.

What Games??? All the current AAA titles. BF4, Planetside 2, Tomb Raider, Blacklist...
 
8800GT lasted around 5 years until one day recently it just stopped working with no warning :(

now rocking a X600 that will not even play TF2

i planned on using it in a new build this fall untill i could save for a new card, but i ordered a R9 280X the other night, so of course the budget on the build has gone higher LOL
 
Still rocking the GTX285 since its release.
Lets me play borderlands 2 and fallout 3 just fine, but started to fell the pain playing battlefield 3.

Now I am in the game for a new card that can last me just as long, decisions decisions.
 
Radeon 9700pro for me. Next is GeForce 7600GS. I didn't really game until recently though. The Geforce was to keep an AGP system alive. Haha
 
Technically I didn't own the card I am going to talk about, it was actually in the family computer when I still lived with my folks. For the life of me I can't remember exactly which card it was, but I think it might have been a Geforce 6600 or something very similar. It was already an old model when we got it. I wasn't really into PC gaming at that time so it didn't see any real action, maybe just some CS I guess.

A few years later I got the computer in my room and started playing games on it. We had upgraded the monitor at some stage, it was this huge Samsung 25.5” 1080 or 1200p screen with the worst colours out of the box that anyone has been subjected to in the last 30 years. The colours stayed like that as I had no idea just how bad they were at the time, nor how to calibrate it. CoD 4 was okay I think, like playable without dropping every setting and scaling the resolution too much. But when I got Black Ops, I had to play at 800x600 or something equally ridiculous, which resulted in these MASSIVE black borders, just to get a decent frame rate. I could hardly read the scoreboard in games of it was that far from its native resolution. That card was mine for about 3 years.
The computer is still at my folks place now and I loaded up Black Ops the a while back when I was visiting. I nearly fell off my chair laughing at how bad it looked... Terrible colour + about 1/5 native resolution + extreme borders. Everything looked like it was made out of giant lego pieces that had been left in the sun and faded.

Lol, just as I was reminiscing and writing this post I heard a knock at the door. It was my 2 7950s that I have been waiting on.. What good timing Mr Postman. I can tell you now I won’t be gaming on these in three years. They will be lucky to last 3 months depending on the [H] review of the 290x due this evening.
 
I think it was my TNT 2 Ultra...but only because that was one of my first 'real' GPU's and I didn't have the $$ to upgrade as often back then
 
TNT2 ultra followed by GeForce 4 and 8800 GTX

Looking like my 480 GTX will beat them all
 
GTX 260 216sp - 2008 > early this year

Changing monitors from 1920x1200 to 2560x1440 is what prompted the upgrade, but it was starting to feel it's age :p
 
My GTX 460 1GB is still going strong overclocked to 800 MHz. They were practically BEGGING enthusiasts to bite on that incredibly good deal, and it's lasted me 3.5 years now! I believe I can wait until the 20nm shrink for my next purchase, since the only challenging game in that time frame is likely to be BF4.

Runner up: my Radeon 8500 LE, which gave me nearly 3 years of solid performance. That was my first ATI card, and it was a good experience.
 
ATI 3870, put an arctic cooler on it perfectly silent... Never crashed once - still using it now.
 
Quantum3d Raven PCI in my Gateway 2000 P100 with a 233 Overdrive chip in it. That Video Card lasted about 4 1/2 years. Ever since it has been a 2-3 year cycle.
 
Well knowing the 290x was coming out, I opted to wait for video on my current build and pulled my old EVGA 7800 GTX out of my old gaming rig from 2005!
 
9800 pro, still have it, still works I believe
8800gt, still have one, still works
Both great cards. :)
 
4890s i had in quadfire lasted me the longest. I think it still had a lot of life left in them. If i had an intel cpu it could have had better utilization in those cpu intense games. A little more than 4 years. Bf3 and blackops 2 still played with good frame rates. Just felt like upgrading though ;). Had to use modified drivers to get it working though in win8.1. Driver support started to lack this year mainly. Some games required directx11 also so it was only a matter of time.

Got 2 7990s crossfired right now. Will last me another 2-3 years at least. Quadfire setups can last years. If you get the best you wont be upgrading so often so you save money in the end. Like right now the games wont be stressing the cards to the brink but later even the 4th card will make a difference.
 
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SLI watercooled 8800 ultras. Still rocking in a 4th or 5th tier box around here somewhere!
 
My old ATI 9800 Pro was the longest card I actively used in my primary gaming PC. I have a 5870 that's still being actively used, but it's moved from a Primary, to secondary and now it lives in a tertiary gaming PC.

My current 680's have the potential to eclipse my 9800 Pro for the simple fact that there is two of them and will hopefully provide adequate performance for some time to come. Ultimately I think they'll last me as long as I stay with my current monitor.
 
My MacBook's GeForce 9400m - 5 years and still going surprisingly strong for my day to day computing.
 
Gtx260 which I'm still using :). Pretty excited about the holidays cuz its upgrade time. Come on price wars!
 
Voodoo 1 for 3+ years
9700 non pro for around 3 years
GTX 470 for 2,5 years

Altrough it was more a case of me not having enough money to upgrade at those point of my life :D
 
Nvidia 6800 Ultra. Around 4-5 years.
Thing is back in those days, games were really progressing fast, and you really needed to change your GPU (and CPU, and add more ram..). And it still served me for a long time. These days, 5 year old GTX 260 will run pretty much anything at reasonable details and resolution. And I still change a gpu every 12-18 months. Makes no sense :).
 
The 5870 2GB eyefinity 6 edition. Lasted me 3 years until bf3. Still runs in my fiancée's rig.
 
I finally upgraded my PC that has been serving me well for 5 years (EVGA 9800GTX, Core 2 Duo E6400, Asus P5B Deluxe, 4GB of Crucial Ballistic Tracer DDR2-1066).

EDIT: Built the system (CPU/motherboard/RAM) in 2006, so the system the 9800GTX was running on was SEVEN years old! I had a 7900GTO, then stepped up to a 7900GTX, then got the 9800GTX. I'm definitely going to be keeping my new 4770K system for at least 3-5 years, with maybe a GPU upgrade thrown in halfway through. Funny thing is, the only reason I even upgraded is because the system was starting to randomly crash, I would have kept it even longer.
 
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8800gtx gave me 5 years of faithful service in-harness. Then she died. I tried the oven fix. No luck.

That was a good long run.
 
5850 with reference cooler in sig. 3+ years. I am sorely in need of an upgrade, although can manage BF3 with decent settings at 1620x1200.

Second longest card was an X800XL for almost 3 years before it turned into bacon.

Waiting for all the new cards to drop this holiday season, hopefully Santa will make a visit this year.
 
Back in 2003 I was given a pair of Xeons and built an entire system around them, using a motherboard that had AGP and could even overclock (rare features for Xeon boards at the time). I had both processors running at 3Ghz, and they each had HT so it showed up as 4 virtual cores. This was a big deal as it was back before dual-core even became popular. That system was sooooo far ahead of it's time that I used it for a very long time. I didn't replace that system until 2007 or so when I built a Q6600 based system.

I used an X800XT-PE AGP with that system for it's entire life. I really had no choice, as the industry had moved to PCIE and the X800XT-PE was already very close to the fastest AGP card available aside from niche overpriced cards that had to use special drivers such as the Radeon 3850 AGP. The X800XT-PE was a good card, the only limiting feature was that it only supported shader model 2.0b, not 3.0. Not having full DX9c support did start to limit it toward the end. If I had been able to stick a faster videocard in that system, I could have seen myself using it until maybe 2009 or 2010 even. Those Xeons were awesome.
 
Another happy former 8800GTX owner. Such a terrific card. I think my wife might even still have it in her machine.
My 9800 Pro was another long-term winner.
In theory I could probably stick with my GTX680 for a while. At 1080p, it performs nearly as well as the newer cards. I'm going to need a pretty compelling reason to move on from it.
 
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