Star Wars Episode One Racer was a great game that I still own, and play it to this day on one of my retro Windows 98se computers. I learned alot over the years also, in 1997 I bought a new computer, I added a 3dfx Monster 3D video card shortly thereafter, I was hooked on 3D gaming after that, and the rest is history. Since then I learned how to buy old computers, and upgrade them, and it's been alot of fun, and very satisfying. I have too many games for any one person to ever play, and I love them all. :) This is a great channel for the inexperienced to learn from, I watch it because I love the hardware, and gaming just as much!
It's amazing hearing your story, which seems so similar to mine. I also got into computers by convincing my dad to buy an AGP 6600GT for our family computer with an old Pentium 4 2.8 GHz cpu. Opening up the PC for the first time was so scary but exciting, and luckily for me the installation went smoothly and the card worked in the PC straight away. It was also when I first learned that there were different speeds of AGP ports and our PC only had 4x, which seemed to limit the 6600GT. That limitation then eventually led to me buying my own PC with an Athlon XP 2800 on a motherboard with an 8x slot. After some overclocking of the Athlon and some RAM upgrades, I slotted the 6600GT in and finally saw its true potential. From that point, I was totally hooked on computers. :)
The 7500 and 7500 LE were very similar. "LE" just denoted a lower GPU clock speed. Both came in a variety of different memory configurations, so some 7500 LE models actually had a 128-bit bus, and some 7500 models only had a 64-bit bus. It was pretty confusing, because AMD had basically let the board manufacturers do whatever they wanted. There definitely should have been a different product name for cards with a 64 vs. 128-bit bus! That being said, even the cheapest version of the 7500 LE was a good card for the price.
Mine was a Radeon 7500 LE :). First thing was that I installed was Max Payne and played it with everything maxed out. Couldn't believe how great it looked. Couldn't believe how great it ran on a Pentium 2 350 Mhz.
I remember getting a 7500 LE precisely because my previous card wouldn't run Max Payne. The naming scheme and specs for cards back then were very inconsistent. As far as I can tell, if it was a "7500 LE" that just meant that it had a moderately lower clock-speed than the full 7500. The LE model also normally had a weaker memory system, but some versions of the non LE version could have a 64-bit bus, and some versions of the LE still had a 128-bit bus, which is obviously pretty ridiculous. They didn't all have the same amount of memory either I believe. All that being said, even the weakest versions of the 7500 LE typically still had very good performance per dollar. I had one of the weaker models, and it was an enormous improvement over my previous graphics card, and there simply wasn't anything better available to me for anywhere near the same price.
I'm pretty glad that my first card was a Spea V7 Mirage VLB instead. I never bought more new graphics cards than in the late 90s. And each and every one of them had exciting new features. God what would I have missed: ATIs PCI Mach 64 with YUV accel, Voodoo 1, Riva 128, TNT, Voodoo 3 and the Geforce 256. I wish I could go back in time.
My first video card that did 3D acceleration was a GeForce 2 MX200 :( There was an S3 ViRGE and a SiS 6326 and some ISA abomination in my history sometime too.
Me too ...😥.used 3danalyzer to play some games requiering pixel shader Support.the pentium 4 did the job of emulating missing 3d effects. 😛sadly this trick was not working for every game
Same here! Got it cheap in 2005 or 2006 when I was 12 or 13. I just bought it and thankfully my PC supported AGP! Could finally play black and white 2...
My first card was also a GeForce 4 MX420, it was my Dads old video card from his prebuilt computer from Best Buy. It could barely play source games, but it worked and it was still fun. Good times.
I remember buying the same 1700+ as 1800+ was expensive, but ended up buying the Radeon VE as me being a student and lack of money. I always dreamt of upgrading to the 7500, and then 8500 and then the 9700 PRO watching all those tech demos but none of that happened until my next upgrade to E8400/8800GT/22" 1050P LCD just in time for crysis. That day was the day of my life. That 8800 GT was a monster of a card :) :) :) But it was bought to its knees by the first game I played on it. lol. Meanwhile till the upgrade, I had to trade my VE with my friend's 4200Ti for a small monthly rent to play Far Cry when he was not playing. Believe it or not, we never bothered about the power supplies back then, and to be frank neither did we know about good PSUs back then. We ran those systems on a 400 INR (8 USD) cheap power supplies and they worked fine for over 3 to 4 years. Good ol days :)
My first video card was an ATi EGA Wonder in a Turbo XT. My first 3D accelerator that I bought with my own money was a PowerVR PCX2. My first true 2D/3D card was a Riva TNT. Those were the good ole days.
I had the original card before It, Radeon 64 VIVO (Radeon 7200) back in 2000, cost me £200, fantastic card, I remember why I bought it, it had EMBM (environmental bump mapping) a feature no Nvidia card had and I'm glad I bought it as Giants Citizen Kabuto looked stunning on it, also the 32bit performance was superb. It wasn't my first graphics card, far from it, probably my 10/12th, it's hard to say as my first was a Trident 1MB 32bit Vesa Local Bus (VLB) back in 1993 when I built my first pc around a Intel DX2 66Mhz and sound blaster pro 2, I must have been mad to spend £1800 building my first pc back then
Similar story ahah. I installed a "multimidia kit" cd-rom drive and sound card, on my mom's AST 486 sx 33 when I was 13. CD-rom worked fine, but I knew nothing about IRQ settings, that was a problema that my step dad fixed later on.
kinda similar to me, my family had computers but my first real pc was an amd athlon Xp 2600+ and an XFX 5200 with 128MB of memory. the shared family pc before that i beleve was an athlon XP 1700+ and we had an MX440 128 that i remember playing Battlefield 1942 on and Star wars galaxies, ah the good old days.
It's amazing that you kept some of your old parts. Great in retrospect to hold onto that gear! I guess I'm abit older, somehow figuring how to use dialup modems to connect to my friends pc, play red alert 1 via serial connection etc... On my 486 dx2 which had a sound card and CDROM added only a couple years before that. Love your channel.
Radeon 8500LE 128MB was my first dedicated 3D accelerator I bought, right around the time of Doom 3 release, which it ran okay (running Doom 3 okay in 2004 was nothing to sneeze at). Paid all of $20 for it back then, which is even more impressive. I only got the brown box of it, but it came with an OEM version of Half-Life + and old build of CS. The copy of HL on the CD was badly corrupted, but the CD-key was good to use to activate the game on Steam, which converted into HL Gold Pack on my Steam account, HL with all it's expansions and mods, including CS, which myself I don't like all that much but played people I know a few times. It was definitely a solid card for the time, and a cracking good deal for the money I got it for. I didn't have any major adventures with it, as it was bought for a new PC I built that had no onboard video (intentionally). I had been assembling and repairing PCs for about 4 years at that point, so it was all unveventful. In 2005 I upgraded to a PNY Geforce FX 5700, because it was on sale and was a pretty cool bundle with TV capturing (which I never really used), an RF remote (which was a big deal as media PCs were just starting out and were all the rage), and came with a flash drive from PNY (back then you had to spend real money on flash drives, they weren't nearly as cheap as they are now). The 8500LE I sold to a high school friend.
my first gpu was the fx5200, 64 bit memory bandwidth. It sucked used it for a couple of months until I got the 6600GT. 6600GT was so much better, than I got the Geforce 7800GS OC which made a pretty big improvement.
Fucking up the family PC is good learning experience. Especially when your folks are pissed off they can't get on AOL and it's 1996 and you get to spend the next 6 hours reinstalling windows and reloading everything else.
my first gpu was the geforce 6600 back in 2007 I believe, I was 6 and my dad got me it to play the orange box on our 2005 gateway pc. Good times, btw did that card ever make u a ati/amd fan boy?
I also "upgraded" from an mx card, tho the 440 not the 420, to a 7500. While it did the same things, it did it faster. It was my 4th card, though probably 8th graphics chip I used. 1st was a pine sis305 32mb, 2nd an Intel 740 when the 305 died, and 3rd the mx440. Other chipset were a sis530 onboard, some cirrus logic pci, an ati rage ii DVD 2mb, and a vlb opti 512kb card. At some point a mx200 as well, but pci. I've since used all sorts of gpus but currently just have a lenovo x230t laptop... Sold the gaming stuff for other things needed for the kids.
That was like my third graphics card but I do remember it. It had these cool "Pixel Tapestry" demos. I remember reading rumors that it was to have an early version of DX8 pixel shader but Nvidia had MS change the spec. Played a lot of Midtown madness with that setup.
My first "3D card" was an Elsa Victory 3D with the S3 VirgeDX Chip. The disappointment was huge! It had 3D in its name but was nothing like the Voodoo my frinds dad had in his pc. So the first REAL 3D Card was (and i still have it) a Creative Graphics Blaster Riva TNT AGP with an K6-2 400MHz (jea, AGP and Pentium1 didn't work out, learned that the hard way too). And then: "Good morning, and welcome to the Black Mesa Transit System..."
my first card was the ATI AIW Pro 4m with an additional 4m added for total of 8M.. I still have this card and it is in one of my windows 98 computers. TV tuner still works and everything.. Loved the card so much when the ATI AIW 9800 pro came out I got it and it still runs my xp machine ..
It was the Radeon 8500 for me but the 7500 inspired me. I've been an IT professional support person now, for some time, dating back to this card. Might have been different without it...
My first "graphics adapter" was either a Cirrus Logic or a Trident card, can't remember which came first. After seeing a Voodoo 2 running on a friends computer, I saved up for a Voodoo 3 then a Voodoo 4 as 3D accelerators. Thanks for making me feel old lol.
My first graphics card was the ATI Rage 128 Pro. Still have it and use it in my Windows 98 gaming PC to date. I remember being 8 or 9 trying to get DOOM 3 to run on it only to inevitably realize I can't. lol
Like I said great video love your videos..... If anybody wants to reply and tell me what your rocking today? I guess I'll go first.. Core i7 6700 non-k 16 gigs of DDR3 GTX 980 TI
For me, my first card was a Voodoo3 3000 AGP. Still have the card laying around. I upgraded my old HP with it, and it started my fascination with PC's. The upgrading, modding, and overclocking began shortly after that, and hasn't stopped to this day.
funny enough left 4 dead 2 was the reason I bought my first budget pc now I'm rocking an 8700k and gtx 1080 and am now a graphics and framerate snob I came a long way from playing games at 15 fps and not even caring
Great video.. I've owned that card but my first card that cost a little money to me .was the ATI Radeon x700 Pro. I remember wanting the x800 so bad fond memories..
my first GPU was a GT730, for like a decade i used to play with integrated graphics and when i finally got my first pc with dedicated GPU it was a life changer, I could finally play Fallout 3 holly shit
Heh...my first graphics card (that I actually bought and installed myself) was an R9 290. Lol, I didn't build my first PC until 2015, though grew up playing a lot of different family computers (all of which were pretty garbage, even during their time. Probably because I grew up lower middle class).
