From NV1 to RTX 5090: Enthusiast Builds Complete Collection of Every NVIDIA Graphics Card

A new video has surfaced online that serves as a perfect visual encyclopedia of gaming graphics. An enthusiast has managed to compile the entire lineup of NVIDIA's reference graphics cards released over three decades—from 1995 to 2025. This collection of 39 GPUs, arranged chronologically, lets you literally see the technological evolution, starting with the legendary NV1, a board that today looks like a true artifact.

Looking at the cards, you can easily trace the shifting design philosophies. The first major visual leap happened with the GeForce 4 series, which introduced turbine-style cooling to replace simple heatsinks. Then, starting with the GeForce 8800 Ultra, cards permanently transformed into the truly massive builds familiar to modern gamers. Among the collection's rarities is the dual-processor GeForce 7950 GX2, built on two separate printed circuit boards.

Tech history buffs will find the story of power delivery particularly fascinating. During the AGP bus era, engineers faced strict power limits. This is evident with the GeForce FX 5700 Ultra, a card whose power appetite exceeded the standard spec, leading to the introduction of a Molex power connector. The shift to the PCI Express standard then made the familiar 6-pin power connector the norm for high-performance models, starting with the GeForce 6 series.

Interestingly, the core industrial design language established with the GeForce 8 series largely remains today. As the collector notes, modern flagships like the newest RTX 5090 are direct descendants of the architecture that first debuted in NVIDIA's Tesla server accelerators, later gaining dedicated cores for ray tracing and AI computations.

The collection's potential market value is a topic of special interest for number-crunchers. If all these cards had been purchased at their original launch prices, the total investment over 30 years would be around $50,000-60,000. However, the real-world value of the collection today is significantly higher, as rare models like the NV1 or the 7950 GX2 can be worth more than some modern graphics cards. A final estimate for the entire set could easily exceed $100,000, though for its owner, it's primarily a historical archive, not a financial asset.