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Most useless piece of computer hardware?

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JHowse

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Come on! You know we all have some or have had some piece of hardware that was almost useless or worthless. Currently, everything of mine has a use, but the most useless thing I ever owned was a Diamond Stealth 3D. That thing, though a great 2D chip, was completely useless for 3D. I was able to get one game up on it, and after that dismal experience, I immediately decided to buy a 3DFX Voodoo Graphics board.

Share your hardware blunder story.

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Does driving a car from Saturn make me an alien?
 
Ah, the world's first "3D Decelerator", the S3 Virge chipset...

I had one of those cards too, and it was great for 2D, but I too added a Diamond Monster 3D, and the combo was great until we upped to a 17" monitor.

For me, not that I've ever owned one, but I've had to try to support them a few times, the most useless piece of computer hardware is the IBM M-Wave.
Integrated combo modem/sound card board, and quite possibly the worst piece of Big Blue crap.

Honorable mentions:
* Winmodems
* 3dfx Voodoo 3 (because it came out underperforming everything else in it's class, and had less features)
* Glide-point mice not connected to a laptop

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spidergoolash: "heh, a cup of diesel dan - mwahhha"
me: "heh, a cup of me is like a cup of heaven!"
 
WaterB> I would agree with you, but in most cases, the framerates on the TNT2 in 32-bit were more than adequate.
For the time that it was released, the Voodoo3 was horribly behind in BOTH performance and features. Hell, even the ATI Rage 128 chipset had better performance than the Voodoo3, plus it offered DVD hardware-assist and 32-bit support. It took 3dfx almost a full 6 months after the release of the Voodoo3 3000 to release the Voodoo3 3500, which sucked even worse because it really didn't boost performance much over the 3000, and all it really added in features was the addition of a TV-out, which was pretty much useless due to it's low signal strength.

Was it a step up from the original Voodoo chipset? Sure. But so was the original TNT, and that even had 32-bit support. Now consider that the TNT2 was released BEFORE the Voodoo3, and you can see why it sucked great big donkey nuts.

FWIW, I have a external SCSI Zip250, and it works fine for me. I wouldn't consider it to be useless. 100MB is still enough to hold a decent amount of mp3 files, if you just want to run over to a friend's and trade an album's worth.

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spidergoolash: "heh, a cup of diesel dan - mwahhha"
me: "heh, a cup of me is like a cup of heaven!"
 
bah.. i hate running.. my **** barely ever leaves my chair..

i got 6T1's
smile.gif


edit:
hmm.. forgot to point out.. but a 32bit TNT2 pushed out frame rates way under 30fps(like 20-24) i think it was for 800x6.. this is actually pretty ****ty.. hard for people to use the railgun or what not.. in a game that you actually had to aim.. the v3 2k was pushing 32fps before i o/c'd it.. then i got 40-42.. had to get a card cooler so the chip wouldn't over heat..

edit2:
bah.. forgot i can't swear.. **** = sh*t

edit3:
argh.. i gotta organize my thoughts better... i forgot to pt out that a V3 3k was about $60-$100 cheaper than a tnt2u.. the V3 2k was cheap as hell especially after that $30 rebate.. i got it sub-$100

edit4:
argh.. ok.. last edit i swear.. i'm not saying that the V3 was a good card.. i concluded that it was a decent card.. it was decent for the $ you paid. Is the TNT2U a better card.. hell yeah.. was it $100 more expensive.. yep.. me making $20/wk.. the V3 was a good buy.. today.. it's completely diff.. the V5's are way overpriced and the V4 is a POS.. the best solution is the GF2MX..(oh.. don't get me started on the M64.. that was the largest POS i've ever seen).. this is just me dissagreeing w/ DD ranking it(the V3) at #2 for the most useless piece of hardware..
 
FWIW, I wasn't ranking it. I was just including it in a group of useless pieces of hardware.

I consider the Mwave and Winmodem to be more offensive pieces of crap than the V3.

As for the framerates you posted, you're comparing apples and oranges.
1) You're comparing the V3 2000 (a value line card) to the TNT2U (a high-end card).
2) You're comparing framerates of one card in 32-bit to another card in 16-bit.
3) You're comparing the prices of a TNT2U to a V3 3k, when the competitor for a V3 3k was the TNT2 non-ultra. It was the 3500 that was supposed to be in the same class of the TNT2U.

And yes, the M64 was a piece of garbage.
Not half as bad as the Matrox M3D, though.
smile.gif



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spidergoolash: "heh, a cup of diesel dan - mwahhha"
me: "heh, a cup of me is like a cup of heaven!"
 
fine.. 16bit TNT2U had a frame rate of 80fps (84 if o/c'd to 195/220) while the V3 3k was at 78.3 (Quake 2 - couldn't find quickly find Q3 numbers). Is 2-6 extra fps worth $70 bucks to you? at 32bit.. the fps of the TNT2U was at 42 (50.5 at 195/220).

oh.. and the 3500 blew away the TNT2U at 16bit.. won't even quote numbers.. but again.. the arguement would be higher fps at 16bit vs lower fps at 32bit. guess it depends on the type of games you play

oh.. and according to the review in anandtech.. the TNT2 was released after the V3

and.. i'm confused.. what features are you talking about? i know that there's no agp texturing support or 32bit support.. what else??? dvd? the tvtuner was decent.. my friend switched to the V3 from the ATI one.. he said they were pretty much the same.. just the ATI tv tuner software was more friendly.
 
The TV tuner only came on the 3500, which cost a bunch more than most other cards of it's time.
And lack of AGP texturing and 32-bit support were HUGE features to not implement, considering that just about every other manufacturer was putting them into their cards a full generation before the V3 was released.

In essence, the V3 was a glorified Voodoo Banshee that was a bit faster.

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spidergoolash: "heh, a cup of diesel dan - mwahhha"
me: "heh, a cup of me is like a cup of heaven!"
 
um.. ok

question.. how much actual use was there for the agp texturing and 32bit before the next generation cards came out? there wasn't any games that really used those features either.. Q3, UT.. a lot of other games were just startagy games (AOE2).. thus mainly 2D..
 
Personally, I used 32-bit on most of my games once I got my ATI Rage Fury, which came out well before the Voodoo3. Not everyone only plays FPS games. I used it on NFS3, FIFA, and a few other games. So, there were definitely games making use of it. And the performance difference was never so severe as to make the game unplayable, or even that I could notice a difference.
If the framerate got too low, I bumped the resolution down a notch, and the game got very playable. I still play all of my games at 1024x768 or higher.

The question of if features were being utilized by the current crop of games is less important than the question of why features long in use in competing cards were not used in the "latest and greatest" by 3dfx.
Very rarely are features implemented in cards being utilized by games currently on the market. More often, features are added into hardware that are going to be taken advantage of by games made in the future. How many games take advantage of the additional bandwidth of AGP 2x? Yet, every card supports it so that when a game does come out that requires the additional bandwidth, it's there.
Otherwise, a card would be obsolete as soon as it came out of the box.

To clarify my stance, before it gets out of hand, the Voodoo3 wasn't a bad card. It was just released too late to be useful. Had it been released a generation earlier, or incorporated some of the features that had been inexplicably left out, it could've been a decent card.
Unfortunately for 3dfx, they waited way too long to release it, and haven't recovered since. For proof of this, see the Voodoo 4 and 5.


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spidergoolash: "heh, a cup of diesel dan - mwahhha"
me: "heh, a cup of me is like a cup of heaven!"
 
1. My external SCSI zip drive
2. My internal IDE zip drive
smile.gif


100MB is nothing now..
frown.gif
got useless the 3rd month i got it..
 
Question. What was the difference between the Voodoo 2 and Voodoo 3? And why didn't 3DFX stick to the accelerator only market? They could still have a market if they did that. Think of it....a GeForce card and a 3DFX accelerator.... Kind of like the Voodoo2/TNT combo. Actually, I still run a Voodoo2 alongside my GeForce for the old Glide stuff.

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Does driving a car from Saturn make me an alien?
 
Water, the 100MB ZIP is still good for documents, pictures, and a few MP3s. That's about it, anymore. Still not terrible if you are in modem hell and have a drive at work and one at home. Also, ZIP is pretty universal.

The useless removable would now be those SyQuest drives.

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Does driving a car from Saturn make me an alien?
 
bleh.. i use my cdrw like a disk drive now...

and um.. voodoo3 2k had about the same performance as 2 voodoo2's SLI'd.. and had 2d.. it was a next step thing for 3dfx.. it produced great framerates but only in 16bit.. it's competition at the time.. TNT2.. could produce great pictures at 32bit.. but slow framerates.. even at 16bit.. so.. it was a toss up which one people got.. i got the V3 cuz i played halflife.. it didn't really help much in 32bit.. and i wanted the higher framerate.. my friend played Q3.. and got the TNT2U.. got beautiful pictures but my framerates were highter than his.. (oh the o/c'ing capability of a V3 2k agp was great
smile.gif
, the TNT2U's were so so in o/cing )
 
I have a V3 3K, myself, and it makes a good Quake/Unreal/Counterstrike card. Dan, however, is right. Had they released the V3 2K instead of the Banshee, it would have been much better. I personally think that 3DFX should have stayed in the 3D only market. The Voodoo graphics and Voodoo2 were both AWESOME cards. I still run a Voodoo2 in my machine alongside my GeForce. Why didn't 3DFX learn from their dismal failures from the Voodoo Rush and Voodoo Banshee (a crippled Voodoo2)?

WaterB, you are right, during the Voodoo2/TNT days and even the early days of the Voodoo3/TNT2, the issues were more frame rate vs. visual quality....though performance was rather close even in 16 bit for both. The TNT2U made a bit of a change on that, and the GeForce completely made it obvious who to choose for the best in 3D acceleration. If only 3DFX had stuck with what it was best at...3D add on cards, it would still dominate in the market.

The old addage is true. Never change a horse in midstream.

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Does driving a car from Saturn make me an alien?
 
For me my most use less piece of gear would be my Pace TV reciever / vid capture card. A more useless piece of crap i have never wasted money on. The reception was so bad it was amazing, especially since my tv had no problems with the arial. And after a while i noticed that none of my music software was working since installing the card.

Back in the box it went. ill probably sell it to some poor sod one day.......

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~blows my mind every time~
 
I still have my ISA Antec TV tuner card. That card kick's @$$!!! It works just like the Voodoo1/2 did...use a pass through cable. That thing is on my 486, now, and still works like a champ. No need to have another TV tuner card, IMHO.

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Does driving a car from Saturn make me an alien?
 
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