On top of this Pale Blue Dot, some very passionate people go above and beyond to find rare or old items and build a collection to showcase them. Redditor ornstein6990 is one of them, spending time, effort, and money to recover as many graphics cards as possible. Fascinated by graphics cards from a younger age, ornstein6990 has finally got the opportunity to build the long-dreamed-about GPU collection. ornstein6990’s aim is to get one of each GPU ever released by Nvidia, ATI (now AMD Radeon), and AMD as time goes by and as funds allow.
Currently, the collection includes some 73 graphics cards, spanning from the first consumer graphics card ever released to the latest flagship models. These are spread as follows:
- 39 Nvidia cards – including models preceding the GeForce series.
- 10 ATI cards – the X1950 XTX was released before AMD purchased ATI.
- 24 AMD cards – including HD 2000 to HD 5000 models, which retained the ATI branding during transition.
Some of the most notable GPUs on display are the NV1, Nvidia’s first-ever graphics card, released back in 1995, the Radeon X1950 XTX, ATI’s last flagship product, and AMD’s Radeon VII, the only consumer gaming card to ship with 16GB of HBM2 memory. Since it didn’t rain green bills the last time I checked, you wouldn’t be surprised to learn that this collection is missing a lot of models. But ornstein6990 made the logical choice of gathering at least one card from each series, preferably a high-end model.
While the Redditor didn’t calculate in detail how much all of this has cost, apparently it was less than $10,000, which is not bad considering a high-end GeForce RTX 5090 goes for $1,999 – if you are lucky to find one at MSRP. How is it possible? Well, ornstein6990 had the bright idea of buying non-working units of modern high-end GPUs to fill the space, waiting until they become more reasonably priced to grab working replacements. Ironically, the most expensive card in this collection is the NV1, which is understandable.
While I don’t see myself collecting figurines or Funko Pops, owning each GPU ever released is definitely on my wish list. And thanks to ornstein6990, I learned a couple of tricks to save some money doing so. Rendezvous in a couple of years to see if I managed to beat ornstein6990.
