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Look at how unhinged GPU box art was in the 2000s (2024)
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- jakebasile 1y agoI miss when gaming in general was less mainstream and more weird like this. Now the silicon manufacturers hate that they even have to sell us their scraps, let alone spend time on making unique designs for their boxes. I bought a small press book with a collection of this art and it was a fun little trip down memory lane, as I’ve owned some of the hardware (boxes) depicted in it. For anyone else interested: https://lockbooks.net/pages/overclocked-launch https://lockbooks.net/pages/overclocked-launch
- m-hodges 1y agoWoah, that book is cool; and so much more from this publisher!
- soupfordummies 1y agoYou ain't kidding! What a treasure trove of a publisher. Never heard of them before, great rec
- doctor_blood 1y agoLGR took a look at it on his channel; a very tiny book, with very tiny art, apparently all grabbed from google images. Something of a letdown.
- debugnik 1y agoWow, I just checked and that's really underwhelming: Tiny page size, lots of padding around the images and yet there's often 4 images per page. The layout makes it seem like the size a was late decision, it would be appropriate for a large artbook.
- Gigachad 1y agoOn the plus side, PC gaming hardware seems to last ages now. I built my gaming desktop in 2020, I had a look lately at what a reasonable modern mid tier setup is and they are still recommending a lot of the parts I have. So I'll probably keep using it all for another 5 years then.
- brokenmachine 1y agoBut your stuff from 2020 probably isn't AI "enhanced"!! Throw it in the garbage!
- SkiFire13 1y agoSounds like a plus to me.
- pjc50 1y agoI was planning on hanging on to my Win10 PC, which was perfectly fine except that Microsoft were both pestering me to upgrade and telling me it wasn't possible, but the death of its SSD after 7 years put paid to that.
- arethuza 1y agoI have a PC that is probably at least 10 years old but works perfectly well for browsing, spreadsheets and the occasional lightweight game but MS has decided, in its infinite wisdom, to say that it can't be upgraded to Windows 11. So I will probably install Linux (probably Debian) and move on and forget about those particular games... (~30 years since I first installed Linux on a PC!).
- IlikeKitties 1y ago> Now the silicon manufacturers hate that they even have to sell us their scraps, let alone spend time on making unique designs for their boxes. I genuinely don't believe this to be true for AMD. I bought a 6600xt on Release Day and by the time I was able to build my complete PC, it had upstream linux kernel support. You can say what you will about AMD but any company that respects my freedoms enough to build a product with great linux support and without requiring any privacy invading proprietary software to use is a-ok in my book. Fuck NVidia though.
- FirmwareBurner 1y ago>I genuinely don't believe this to be true for AMD. I bought a 6600xt on Release Day That was 2021 though when AMD was still a relative underdog trying to claw market share from Nvidia from consumers. AMD of today has adjusted their prices and attitude to consumers to match their status as a CPU and GPU duopoly in the AI/datacenter space.
- IlikeKitties 1y agoYou can still buy their GPUs, they work perfectly fine on linux ootb and they even make stuff like the AI Max for local AI that is very end user and consumer friendly. Yes, GPUs got more expensive which is a result of increased demand for them. But for a hardware company, as long as their linux support is as good as it currently is, they are a-ok in my book.
- opan 1y agoI agree with the spirit of your post, and that AMD is probably the lesser evil, but it's worth noting they "just" moved the proprietary bits into a firmware blob. It's still similarly proprietary but due to the kernel being pretty open to such blobs, it's a problem invisible to most users. You'd have to use linux-libre to get a feel for how bad things really are. You can't really use any modern GPUs with it.
- jasomill 1y agoI understand the sentiment, but I don't see how devices with proprietary firmware stored in ROM or NVRAM are any more free or open than devices that require proprietary firmware loaded at boot. And it looks like Linux-Libre also opposes CPU microcode updates[1], as if bugged factory microcode with known security vulnerabilities is any less non-free than fixed microcode. Recommending an alternative architecture that uses non-proprietary microcode I can understand; this I cannot. [1] https://www.phoronix.com/news/GNU-Linux-Libre-4.16-Released https://www.phoronix.com/news/GNU-Linux-Libre-4.16-Released
- pjc50 1y ago> I miss when gaming in general was less mainstream and more weird like this. To me, this is a continuum with the box art of early games, where because the graphics themselves were pretty limited the box art had to be fabulous. Get someone like Roger Dean to paint a picture for the imagination. https://www.rogerdean.com/ https://www.rogerdean.com/ The peak of this was the Maplin electronics catalogue: https://70s-sci-fi-art.ghost.io/1980s-maplin-catalogues/ https://70s-sci-fi-art.ghost.io/1980s-maplin-catalogues/ ; the Radio Shack of UK electronics hobbyists, now gone entirely. Did they need to have cool art on the catalogue? No. Was it awesome? Yes.
- pavlov 1y agoThis great interview with Roger Dean about his career in games was recently posted: https://spillhistorie.no/2025/10/03/legends-of-the-games-industry-roger-dean/ https://spillhistorie.no/2025/10/03/legends-of-the-games-ind... Turns out that the Psygnosis developers in the 1980s used him as a kind of single-shot concept artist. They would commission the box art first, then use that as inspiration for designing the actual game to go inside the box.
- Gud 1y agoReminds me of the Anderson Bruford Wakeman & Howe 12” cover: https://row.rarevinyl.com/products/anderson-bruford-wakeman-howe-anderson-bruford-wakeman-howe-gatefold-german-vinyl-lp-album-record-209970-518816?shpxid=4ebcf15e-7bd7-4ad5-862c-d4d3eb968a83 https://row.rarevinyl.com/products/anderson-bruford-wakeman-...
- rsynnott 1y agoHuh. I hadn't actually realised Maplin was gone entirely. They closed in Ireland a while back, but I put that down to a general trend of marginal UK high-street retailers (Argos etc) pulling out of Ireland, but still existing in some form in the UK. Weird shop; they never really got rid of any stock that was even theoretically useable, so it was at least partially a museum of outdated gadgets.
- nice_byte 1y agolook at the evolution of the DirectX branding through the years as well. OGs remember the logo themed after the radioactive hazard symbol.
- ComputerGuru 1y agodxdiag.exe
- cruffle_duffle 1y agoLink because I had to look it up to remember: https://logos.fandom.com/wiki/DirectX https://logos.fandom.com/wiki/DirectX
- Mountain_Skies 1y agoThose box designers appear to have moved on to the performance whey protein and workout supplement industry.
- booleandilemma 1y agoAs usual, when money is to be found the soulless bean counting serious mba types come along and kill all the fun. Not to mention all the pretending money-seekers who can't code their way out of a paper bag.
- moomoo11 1y ago[flagged]
- BeetleB 1y ago> As usual, when money is to be found the soulless bean counting serious mba types come along and kill all the fun. A reminder: Even years after inventing CUDA, Nvidia, the top GPU manufacturer, was fighting for survival. I'm not sure what saved them - perhaps crypto. If you ignore the money, they appeared quite strong. But they struggled financially. Intel famously considered buying them around 2010 because they knew they could buy them cheap - Nvidia might not survive and weren't in a position to negotiate). Thankfully, the Intel CEO killed the idea because he knew Jensen wouldn't work well with Intel. Nvidia may not have been saved by "bean counters", but they do have a place in the world.
- lethologica 1y agoThis is a blast from the past! I remember being really young and buying a GPU based solely on what art was on the box (and yes, it was a scantily clad woman) and getting really, really luckily that it actually worked with my components but it was my intro to upgrading PCs!
- kristianp 1y agoThe Voodoo range had some cool boxes: https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/yp5qzo/3dfx_voodoo345_remains_the_greatest_product/ https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/yp5qzo/3dfx_v...
- Mawr 1y agoPlease stop reminding me of how soulless and watered down everything has become :( Games are no different, in Morrowind gods ripped each other's penises off and used them as spears; in Skyrim you fight dragons.
- bee_rider 1y agoFor sure, games have gotten bland and lame. But in an era of quirky games Morrowind was still extra quirky.
- krige 1y agoWell there is still an NPC that proclaims Kirkbride's drug binge fueled [affectionately] lore. Besides, in Skyrim you eat souls of hitherto immortal beings in an act of metaphysical cannibalism, and, among other things, get to witness firsthand exactly what happens to those souls you trap to fuel your fancy sword of zapping. Meanwhile, in the background, Vivec might or might not have been kidnapped to be on the receiving end of that spear thing, and fascist elves are trying their hardest to undo the universe (it's not plot pertinent though), and also briefly did (or claimed to do) something to the moons (that are not moons, remember) that terrified an entire race into submission. The point is, the lore is still there. You just have to pay attention, because it's not always spelled outright.
- GaryBluto 1y agoWhy play modern games? There is an almost infinite backlog of experiences for you to indulge in from the late 90s/early 2000s alone. They're also great value; a couple months back I went to a local store and bought 100 or so "old" game CD/DVDs for less than $35, none scratched. For the price of one triple-A game, I'd probably have been able to get 250 at least.
- zdw 1y agoUnusual designs are still a thing in some markets (mainly china) - for example, a cat themed cooler: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fGGKaX1D9Zo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fGGKaX1D9Zo and various anime themed backplates on cards are available from Yeston: https://yestonstore.com/collections/graphics-card https://yestonstore.com/collections/graphics-card
- dlivingston 1y agoThat's fantastic. I recently bought a Lofree mechanical keyboard (they're a Chinese brand) and they definitely have the most unusual hardware designs I've ever seen. Here's one of their mice: https://www.lofree.co/products/lofree-petal-mouse https://www.lofree.co/products/lofree-petal-mouse
- Larrikin 1y agoIt's nice to see, but the design feels like it's meant to go into a clear case so that it can be streamed for the world to see.
- makeitdouble 1y agoThanks, Japan is in the same boat. From full cases [0] including the CPU cooler in general, to themed components[1], when it comes to gaming makers are going beyond and above to create cool visuals. [0] https://www.dospara.co.jp/gamepc/kuzuha.html https://www.dospara.co.jp/gamepc/kuzuha.html [1] https://www.yodobashi.com/product/100000001009108157/ https://www.yodobashi.com/product/100000001009108157/
- numpad0 1y agoThe ones in the article are boxes only, the actual cards were different from what were represented on the box. Anime-themed products are products themselves in various themes. I'd argue that these two are different phenomena.
- chao- 1y agoYears ago, I picked up a low profile, single-slot GPU that worked well in Linux to throw in old machines when someone gives me one to mess with or recover. The best fit at the time was a Yeston AMD card, and in a world of cards that are all "Black with {{primary_color}}" the choice of blinding magenta made me smile.
- neko_ranger 1y agosoul
- abtinf 1y agoI would guess part of the reason for this was box art used to matter because most of these cards were sold through dedicated electronics retailers like Fry's Electronics, Microcenter, and CompUSA. There was basically no such thing as online ordering for this sort of thing. People were physically browsing goods on shelves.
- MoOmer 1y agoJust chiming in here, but at least two of the generations of cards there are from ~2005-2008 and we old farts definitely bought (or convinced our parents to buy) things from Newegg at the time!
- IMSAI8080 1y agoI think it comes from a marketing exaggeration of what the card could do. None of the cards of the day could actually produce their own box art (in real time) but the art implies they could in a way they can get away with. It follows the tradition of box art on 8-bit games wildly exaggerating what the in-game graphics might look like and they'd sometimes post a tiny disclaimer in the corner.
- GaryBluto 1y agoI miss electronics retailers. Any hardware project nowadays requires me to wait several days before I can actually start as I am forced to order online.
- ulfw 1y agoWhen people still bought Graphics Processing Units for processing graphics and not crypto mining or AI inferencing
- tcherasaro 1y agoI remember some of those.
- dkh 1y agooh god some of these just brought back memories long repressed
- bee_rider 1y agoI think what happened is, at the time those were literally more or less examples of the best scenes the cards could render. Nowadays, putting together an example of the best scene the card could render requires a whole art department and a couple months of design. Nobody’s going to spend months on box art, so we get bland rectangles or whatever.
- dlcarrier 1y agoIt's nothing that complicated. Nvidia started micromanaging their distributors, and removed all the fun, and AMD just copies what they do.
- gdulli 1y agoOr it was just a fad when the scene was novel and it ran its course as fads and design elements do. This explanation doesn't require there to be an enemy to demonize but sometimes there just isn't, as much as we might want there to be.
- Gigachad 1y agoWhat the best scene you could render is a bit fuzzy. In blender you could render anything at all. But in a game, at what resolution, and what framerate, are the shadows dynamic or baked in?
- Lammy 1y ago> you could say they were unhinged > GPU makers have all abandoned this practice, which is a shame as it provided something different through box art alone. Now, we're drowning in bland boxes and similar-looking graphics cards I feel like there could be a more positive adjective than “unhinged” if you're going to turn around and praise it. OED sez “wildly irrational and out of touch with reality”. How about “whimsical”? I love this stuff and think we need to bring this kind of whimsy back to computing. > There's a scantily dressed lady in armor Author neglects to mention that ATi/AMD had a named ongoing marketing character for many many years — Ruby! - Agent Ruby Demo Compilation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sUAuj0Jn8UI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sUAuj0Jn8UI - 2008 Ruby demo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YjXCae4Gu0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YjXCae4Gu0 - Ruby origin story https://web.archive.org/web/20071023192128/http://game.amd.com/us-en/unlock_ruby.aspx https://web.archive.org/web/20071023192128/http://game.amd.c... - ATI Agent Ruby™ Usage Guidelines 1.0 http://www.barbaraburch.com/portfolio/whitepaper6.pdf http://www.barbaraburch.com/portfolio/whitepaper6.pdf - She even stuck around long enough for the ATi name to entirely disappear from AMD Radeon branding: https://i.imgur.com/uBWfzCA.jpeg https://i.imgur.com/uBWfzCA.jpeg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bwIMHX7rW8Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bwIMHX7rW8Q (2013) - AMD-exclusive Ruby skin for Quake Champions https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-LRSqC9n0Tc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-LRSqC9n0Tc (2017) > GeForce 6600 GT was enclosed inside a box featuring a lovely lady nᴠɪᴅɪᴀ had several named demo characters too, but they removed all the pretty lady ones some time in 2020. Compare: - https://web.archive.org/web/20200921115422/https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/community/demos/ https://web.archive.org/web/20200921115422/https://www.nvidi... - https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/community/demos/ https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/community/demos/ Adam Sessler voice I give this article a two… out of five.
- aunty_helen 1y agoAhhh reminded me of my sapphire 3870 toxic edition. Cool box art and one of the coldest running cards I’ve owned with the Vapor x chamber.
- rpcope1 1y agoI loved the weird boxes back in the 90s and 2000s. I remember dad would always take us to computer trade shows and ham events, and occasionally you'd see someone from ATi or Nvidia (or one of the integrators) demoing their wares with all sorts of bizarre and funny demo software and renders. I don't know if it was just me or what, but they always sent real nice sales or marketing people and it was fun to talk to them about the GPUs as a kid. I think they were as mystified (I recall several of them laughing about it) about the box art as everyone else was.
- makeitdouble 1y agoOn nowadays gaming related unhinged designs, I raise the CoolMaster Shark X PC case to your attention: https://www.coolermaster.com/en-global/products/shark-x/ https://www.coolermaster.com/en-global/products/shark-x/
- g-b-r 1y agoWhen you'd first get a 3d accelerator you'd enter in a completely new world, the graphics and speed you'd get were on a different planet with what your computer could do without them. I think that the boxes initially reflected that. My first accelerator (rather late) was that 3D Blaster Voodoo 2; the graphics of the box contributed to the emotion of holding it, they looked better than in the picture. I was mindblown when I saw what the card could do, and I believe to have thought that the graphics did reflect well its capabilities. I sure kept the box for many years. I imagine that then the manufacturers felt compelled to keep making boxes which would stand out; and in part, yes, they tried to attract some purchases from people who didn't originally mean to get a new graphics card.
- edgineer 1y agoNvidia also had really cool demo programs you'd run with each generation to show off what your new card could do. [0] You'll have to use the Internet archive to see them all. [1] Several, like 'Dawn' for example, were quietly removed in 2020. [0] https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/community/demos/ https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/community/demos/ [1] http://web.archive.org/web/2019/https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/community/demos/ http://web.archive.org/web/2019/https://www.nvidia.com/en-us...
- cuu508 1y agoYou can watch them on youtube also: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=DfWSJvKFMPE https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=DfWSJvKFMPE
- GauntletWizard 1y agoThat's nice, but they were interactive - You could move around the scene or change the camera angles. The fact that you could do this and prove it was realtime and not prerendered was part of the demo and most of the charm. Lacking that, it's just... lacking.
- zamadatix 1y agoMost of that charm is gone after 20 years, nobody needs proving the dynamic lights are really dynamic anymore. They're still some fun to interact with anyways, or just fun as a way to review what was hot shit at the time, but I couldn't get a few of the really old ones to run on Windows 10/11 this summer. A video is a lot better than just saying "well, I'm not going to build an old PC just to play this demo" and not seeing it at all.
- hoherd 1y agoThat bubble demo was absolutely mind blowing. After seeing that I never looked back at 3dfx.
- jzwinck 1y agoSound cards too. The Hercules website still proudly shows all their boxes from back when sound cards were popular for gaming and more: https://support.hercules.com/en/cat-soundcards-en/ https://support.hercules.com/en/cat-soundcards-en/ Several models don't even have pictures of the card, but every one of them shows the crazy box. They also still list all their old GPUs. Compare the wild boxes at the top with the TV tuner boxes at the bottom: https://support.hercules.com/en/cat-videocards-en/ https://support.hercules.com/en/cat-videocards-en/
- Wurdan 1y agoJust the mention of pieces of hardware we don't really need anymore (sound cards, modems, etc) triggers a flood of nostalgia. I used to spend DAYs poring over PC part catalogues dreaming of my ideal rig. And brands like Hercules, Creative, Matrox all trigger the same feelings. Crazy contrast to me having spent the past weekend wondering if cloud gaming services like Geforce Now are matured enough that I can fully move to a thin client - fat server setup for the little bit of gaming I still do.
- pjc50 1y agoThe technology works, but the business model doesn't, so there's the eternal risk that it might get shut down at short notice with no way to export your saves.
- Wurdan 1y agoYeah, that's definitely a worry. Also, the fact that you're dependent on them for adding support for future games, and that (like any cloud service) it might not be available right when you want it.
- Nextgrid 1y agoYeah that's the issue - nobody wants to just rent you a gaming PC in the cloud, they all want a cut of game sales/licensing. But if someone were to do it, the technology is absolutely there. You don't even need to create any internal tech - Steam Remote Play already has everything you need, and I successfully used it to play Battlefield from an AWS GPU instance (was even good enough for multiplayer).
- vinkelhake 1y agoBesides the box art, I miss the days when 1) the graphics card didn't cost more than the rest of the components put together, 2) the graphics card got all of its damn power through the connector itself, and 3) MSRP meant something.
- Biganon 1y ago4) scalpers only existed for sports and music venues
- aleph_minus_one 1y agoThe existence of scalpers rather shows that the producer set the price of the product (in this case GPU) too low [!] for the number of instances of the product that are produced. Because the price is too low, more people want to buy a graphics card than the number of graphics cards that can be produced, so even people who would love to pay more can't get one. Scalpers solve this mismatch by balancing the market: now people who really want to get a graphics card (with a given specification) and are willing to pay more can get one. So, if you have a hate for scalpers, complain that the graphics card producer did not increase its prices. :-)
- alex43578 1y agoI just bought a RTX 5090 at MSRP. While expensive, it's also a radically more complicated product that plays a more important role in a modern computer than old GPUs did years ago. Compared to my CPU (9950X3D), it's got a massive monolithic die measuring 750mm2 with over 4x the transistor count of the entire 9950X3d package. Beyond the graphics, it's got tensor and RT cores, dedicated engines for video decode/encode, and 32GB of DDR7 on the board. Even basic integrated GPUs these days have far surpassed GPUs like the RTX 970, so you can get a very cheap GPU that gets power through the CPU socket, at MSRP.
- ProllyInfamous 1y agoDo yourself/me a favor, and give your 5090's power plug/socket a little jiggle test. I'm a retired data center electrician, and my own GPU's has been "loose" at least more than once. Really make sure that sucker is jammed in there/latched.
- userbinator 1y agoCrazy, outrageous graphics on a graphics accelerator box seems quite fitting. Of course these days they do far more than just render 3D graphics (and that which they do has become quite common), so perhaps that also reflects the shift away from this branding.
- mmsc 1y agoTFA calls it unhinged, I call it creative and exciting. Now all we get is rounded edges, solid colours, and "copies of reality" - boring; if I wanted reality I'd go outside and touch grass.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- chao- 1y agoI'll never forget the big, dumb gorilla on the side of my mid-2000's 7900 GTX from a King Kong game tie-in product launch. Never played the game, but when I'm installing a GPU I sometimes think of that stupid decal and chuckle. Searched and managed to find an image: https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/144323l/great_save_from_the_flea_market_today_asus/ https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/144323l/great...
- thih9 1y agoThese images were originally posted on Reddit; there are more examples in the original post: https://old.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/y7wcd7/gpu_box_art_in_the_90s_was_utterly_crazy/ https://old.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/y7wcd7/gpu_bo...
- dvh 1y agoBehold, the Delphi 1.0 installer screen: https://www.gladir.com/SOFTWARE/DELPHI1/delphi1-install5.png https://www.gladir.com/SOFTWARE/DELPHI1/delphi1-install5.png
- badsectoracula 1y agoEarly to mid 90s Borland had a lot of fun making "multimedia" :-) There was also this[0] video posted recently here of a Turbo Pascal tutorial which has some interesting intro :-) [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOtonwG3DXM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOtonwG3DXM
- Flamingoat 1y agoI had a Powercolor 9000 pro "Evil Commando". My friends and I thought it looked like a terrorist out of some old action movies. It kinda looked a bit like Universal Soldier. Later on I bought a Sapphire 9800pro "Atlantis" which had some T1000 esque figure on the box art. After that a lot of stuff becoming more corporate and boring.
- 00deadbeef 1y agoIt wasn't just the art, but the boxes themselves. I remember buying this GPU which came in an X-shaped box: https://www.amazon.nl/-/en/First-NVidia-GeForce-128MB-Graphics/dp/B0006I5FXI https://www.amazon.nl/-/en/First-NVidia-GeForce-128MB-Graphi...
- frays 1y agoBlast from the past. Can't believe this was a hobby for me and my dad during primary school and now understanding how computers work led me to my current full time job to put food on the table for my own children.
- segmondy 1y agounhinged? that's how regular ads were, it could be for anything
- johnboiles 1y agoGPUs back in the day were only for gamers. Now they are for increasing your ai b2b saas arr.
- hoherd 1y agoThe 3dfx "Medicine" commercial seems like the most unhinged old-school gaming marketing https://youtu.be/tVsuUv5FolA https://youtu.be/tVsuUv5FolA
- wink 1y agoNeither do I find most of the mentioned old boxes here unhinged nor do I find this one (last year) to be big corp sterile - https://www.ask-corp.jp/products/images/sapphire/sapphire-pure-radeon-rx-9070-xt-gaming-oc-16gb-gddr6_01.jpg https://www.ask-corp.jp/products/images/sapphire/sapphire-pu...