Look at how unhinged GPU box art was in the 2000s

Summary

Summary Remember when GPU box art was a wild, drug-infused journey? Now, it's bland and similar-looking, missing the oddities. Dive into nostalgia with graphics card box art from the late 90s and early 00s - bold, strange, and iconic designs. Modern GPU boxes lack the excitement of the past, where elves, wizards, and demons graced the covers. Enjoy the journey back. Not only has the graphics card come a long way over the past two decades, but so too has GPU box art. In the early 2000s, we saw an avalanche of box art that seemed like whoever designed them was on quite the drug-infused journey — you could say they were unhinged. Typically, the graphics card inside the box wasn't even displayed on the front cover. This was reserved for elves, wizards, druids, mech droids, demons, game characters, and strange oddities. 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. Gazing at my passively cooled PowerColor HD6850 from the tail end of the 2000s, I'll take you back to an age when box art meant everything. Full of specification badges, big text, bold imagery, and outright strange designs, here are some of my favorites from the late 90s and early 00s. 10 Hercules 3D Prophet Radeon 9500 Pro Credit: Source: Reddit I heard you liked seeing Joker on the front of your graphics card box. No? Well, tough! Hercules decided to send you into oblivion with the 3D Prophet 9500 Pro, rocking an ATI Radeon GPU. Imagine seeing ten boxes of this GPU at the store, each with this chap endlessly gazing at you. 9 Palit Radeon X700 Credit: Source: Reddit This Palit Radeon X700 box is iconic, representing precisely what one would expect from this early 2000s era. There's a scantily dressed lady in armor that barely covers her exposed body against attacks, countless specification highlights that mean absolutely nothing to the average buyer, and ATI's classi...