ATi Radeon 9800 Pro - The Ultimate GPU of the early 2000s

Let's go back a few years.... ok, well, more like 22 years.  The year is 2004, and the ol eMachines PC isn't quite cutting it.  Doom 3 won't play, Halo PC won't play, and Half Life 2 is barely chugging along.  That setup was a pretty stock eMachines PC with a Celeron processor, an extra stick of RAM (I think we were at 256mb..) and an Nvidia FX5200 PCI (not even AGP) GPU.

 So let's upgrade and get some frames per second going.  What was the setup?  A Pentium 4 2.4C w/ HT and an ATi Radeon 9800 Pro GPU.  What a huge upgrade.  And for those that may be younger than the age of this card, yes AMD purchased ATi in 2006.  Anyway, this thing smoked every game at the time.  Many hours were spent playing the above mentioned games, because what else would a high school student be doing, studying?  Meh.

 Let's skip the actual performance of the card and just admire the box art for this bad boy.  Look at that gargoyle.  If that's not the coolest box art you've ever seen, I don't know if we can be friends.  Modern PC peripherals don't have this kind of creativity anymore, and haven't for at least the last 10-15 years.  I don't know if it's because most people just order their stuff online and aren't looking at shelves of product in a store or what, but back in my day, staring at a wall of GPU boxes was a thing of beauty.

It doesn't get any better than the ATi Radeon 9800 Pro.