Amassing over $10,000 worth of retro GPUs over 14 years, this avid collector says they were astounded it started with a $28 purchase

I felt pretty content upgrading to an RTX 4070 Super last year, yet taking one peek on Reddit put my modest rig to shame. One Nostalgic user has managed to own so many retro Nvidia cards that it was this close to shattering the shelf some of them rested on.

The aptly named u/GPU-Collector has a collection that has taken them 14 years to amass, and since shared to the Nvidia subreddit.

This collection starts with the Riva TNT chip (first released in 1998) and spans all the way to the Nvidia GeForce 8800 Ultra, which launched in 2007.

You may be wondering how someone manages to collect somewhere between $10,000 to $20,000 worth of GPUs from a relatively small time frame, and the answer is seemingly with much difficulty.

I reached out to the GPU collector in question, who clarified that the specific cutoff moment for their collection is the “8th generation of Nvidia cards with the 8800 GTX and Ultra”. That’s a good decision, the 8800 is one of our favourite GPUs of all time too.

The rarest GPU they currently own is a “pair of 6800 Ultras by Gainward. The Cool FX cards. They were the first ever water-cooled graphics cards from the factory.” They also own an Elsa Gloria XXL in the box with accessories, which goes for multiple thousands of dollars today.

The estimated worth of their GPU collection is “highly dependent on collectors” like them, “who are willing to pay several hundreds of dollars for a 20-year-old piece of hardware.”

Collecting retro graphics cards is an interesting hobby because, while there definitely appears to be some money in it, GPU-Collector’s favourite GPU isn’t the most expensive one.

Their personal favourite is the GeForce 6800 Ultra from 2004, as that was when “we went from 32 to 64-bit in CPUs and from AGP to the PCIe standard.” They praised games of its era like Far Cry, Half-Life, and *shudders* Doom 3.

Despite paying hundreds or thousands of dollars to get some of this gear, I’m told the 6800 Ultra was nowhere near.

It was “as unobtainable as a 5090 is today for young gamers” at the time of its release, but despite this, when they went to search for this same bit of hardware in 2010, they found it for just €25 (or about $28) on eBay.

Their favourite GPU box art is not the one housing their favourite GPU. That honor goes to the Albatron Medusa GeForce 4 Ti 4800, which comes with a render of Medusa and her snake hair gently beckoning the player to pick up the box.

It feels very of its era and is an interpretation of the mind-boggling effects that GPUs were capable of at the time. Sometimes ‘they don’t make ’em like they used to’ is about gorgons on GPU boxes, actually.

the pile of GPUs is pretty mighty as you can see above, but the white whale of GPU-Collector’s collection is currently the GeForce FX 5800 Ultra, a high-end GPU from 2003 with a whopping 500 MHz memory clock and 128 MB of blazing fast GDDR2 RAM. This thing could render so many textures if you let it.

What makes the 5800 Ultra a bit of a rare find is the fact that it’s kinda bad. Overpriced with a loud and rather garish cooling system, Nvidia’s mistakes are also part of its history, which would explain why one might want one.

Collecting retro cards doesn’t mean GPU-Collector isn’t also up-to-date with the latest cards, and they have told me they are currently rocking an Asus RTX 5080. The lucky so-and-so.