I hold on to hardware for far longer than I should. If it's not a weirdly placed sense of sentimentality, it's the fantasy of 80's Harrison Ford nimbly picking his way through the frankly dangerous detritus littering my home office, unearthing tech from yesteryear, and declaring "This belongs in a museum!" Well, it turns out one hardware enthusiast is way ahead of me there.
Korean YouTuber and Dark Souls enthusiast, ornstein6990, recently uploaded two separate video tours through 30-years of Nvidia and AMD (plus ATI) hardware history (via Techspot). The private collection is beautifully displayed, with every GPU accompanied by a little plaque listing the card's name, architecture, and release year.
Almost every flagship card is here, from Nvidia's very first GPU, the NV1 from 1995, to a non-functional display unit of the RTX 5090 is here (though they say they hope to one day replace this with one that works). Though Voodoo doesn't even get so much as a look in, it's still a more up to date collection than our very own timeline of game-changing GPUs.
Ornstein6990 also shared their collection with Reddit, claiming that "about two-thirds" of the displayed cards are still operational. Everything was bought second-hand, with the Redditor claiming that the total they spent on the entire collection "definitely doesn’t reach $10,000." The most expensive card, however, was the aforementioned NV1.
The above timeline shows the most game-changing GPUs, though this doesn't include the current generation.
Now, I know what some folks may be thinking—'Why no Voodoo cards?' And that's simply because the collector feels no nostalgia towards that particular thread of graphics card history. Their favourite card in the collection is the Nvidia GeForce GTX 690 from 2012 for its cool, metallic design. As for which GPU is in the collector's personal gaming rig today, they're currently rocking AMD's RX 9070 XT.
They also write that putting together this collection has been on their bucket list since childhood, and that they also simply enjoy testing old cards. They elaborate in one comment, "For example, I like to test whether an old GTX 580 can still handle many new games even 15 years later."
My favourite detail about this story though is that this isn't just some lovingly curated collection tucked away in a lonely mansion somewhere. Ornstein6990 shares in one comment, "Actually, I’m living with my girlfriend, and she’s trying her best to understand me, LOL."
On this point, we're not so different—my other half swears that my many Miku Hatsune figurines move around in the night.
1. Best overall: AMD Radeon RX 9070
2. Best value: AMD Radeon RX 9060 XT 16 GB
3. Best budget: Intel Arc B570
4. Best mid-range: Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 Ti
5. Best high-end: Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090
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