Especially over the last few generations, graphics cards have been boring. There have been standout successes when it comes to value, including the RX 9070 XT and Arc B580, but it seems like we get fewer and fewer crazy GPU ideas each generation. Years ago, that wasn't the case.

There was a time when the shelves of your local Fry's or Micro Center were lined with some of the most bizarre GPU designs and concepts the world has ever seen, most of which made for a couple of spicy headlines and a few odd glances, but not much more. They deserve a second look, though, if for nothing more than to celebrate how wacky PC hardware used to be.

6 AMD Radeon Fury X

When air just isn't enough

We're going to start with a little familiar territory, and there's no better GPU for that than the Radeon Fury X. Although this is a relatively recent, and relatively well-known, GPU, it still stands as one of the boldest designs AMD has ever released. And a big reason why is that the design came from AMD. It was only available as a liquid-cooled GPU that shipped with an all-in-one liquid cooler strapped to the card. It also started a brief stint where AMD experimented with High-Bandwidth Memory (HBM) on consumer graphics cards, which it has (obviously) since abandoned.

The biggest issue with the Radeon Fury X was just that it was weird, largely as a result of what it was trying to accomplish at the time it was released. Around a decade ago when the card launched, both AMD and Nvidia were having problems scaling performance as semiconductor shrinkages started to slow. It created an environment of big, loud, and hot GPUs, and most enthusiasts were forced into dual-GPU setups to maximum 4K gaming performance. The Radeon Fury X tried to address these problems. It was a massive, tiny GPU. The die itself was huge, but the actual card was small and quiet with the built-in liquid cooling.

It worked, but the weirdness ultimately proved to be the downfall of the Fury X. Despite the advantages of HBM, the card only came with 4GB, while Nvidia's flagship GTX 980 Ti at the time came with 6GB. Combined with the AIO cooler, which was unheard of for a GPU at the time, the Radeon Fury X didn't catch on.

5 Diamond Edge 3D

Nvidia likes to sweep the NV1 under the rug

In the early days of 3D graphics, GPUs were still trying to find their footing. The term "GPU" hadn't even been coined yet, and the semiconductor industry was closer to micrometers than it was single-digit nanometer measurements. The then-unknown Nvidia released its first product in 1995, which was internally called the NV1 but showed up on store shelves as the Diamond Edge 3D. It wasn't just a card for 3D graphics. It was a so-called "multimedia card," which aimed to combine a graphics and audio processor together in a single card.

It was a complete flop, and the NV1 nearly sunk Nvidia as a company. It wasn't just the expensive, bolted-on sound card, but also how Nvidia designed the NV1 itself. It used quadradic texture mapping for rendering, matching what Sega did with the Saturn console. The PC industry, however, was moving toward triangle-based primitives for rendering, vastly limiting support for the NV1 and Nvidia's canceled NV2. Nvidia clearly caught on to where the industry was heading, but the NV1 Diamond Edge 3D remains one of the strangest GPUs ever. It's effectively a GPU that can play PC ports of Saturn games with a sound card strapped on, and that's it.

4 PowerColor Devil 13 series

What's better than one GPU? Two, obviously

Back to more modern times. The Radeon Fury X was a response to dual-GPU setups, offering a massive single GPU that necessitated liquid cooling. PowerColor took a slightly different approach. Starting with the Radeon HD 7990, PowerColor introduced dual-GPU graphics cards under the Devil 13 name. PowerColor actually beat AMD to releasing a dual-GPU graphics card, which AMD eventually showed off with the R9 295X2 a generation later.

PowerColor maintained a dual-GPU model as an extreme flagship for a few generations, but it eventually rebranded its flagship range to Red Devil and left dual-GPU designs in the dust. Although dual-GPU graphics cards didn't exist for long, it's hard to knock PowerColor for the ambition. These were massive GPUs, firmly occupying three slots and coming fit with huge coolers that were unheard of at the time. We may not have Devil 13 cards today, but for a brief period of time, there was precious little you could buy that was faster.

3 ATI Radeon HD 5450 PCIe x1

Taking the slow lane

I'm using the ATI Radeon HD 5450 PCIe x1 here as a stand-in for a handful of PCIe x1 graphics cards we've seen pop up over the years. Zotac has a GT 710 with access to only one PCIe lane, for example, but regardless of the brand or GPU model, the PCIe limitation is what's important. Graphics cards are one of the few applications where you can truly saturate a PCIe interface, and even low-end GPUs like the RX 6500 XT have run into issues with too few PCIe lanes. So, why in the world would you design a GPU with access to only a single PCIe lane?

Weird as it may seem, there are a few applications for a GPU like this, mainly when it comes to a home lab or server setup. Maybe you just need something to put pixels on a display — one of these PCIe x1 cards is what you're after. There aren't a ton of these on the market, especially today, considering how niche their applications are. But they represent the lowest of the low-end when it comes to GPUs, with board partners shaving every last gram of gold contacts to get the card to the lowest price possible.

2 Colorful iGame GTX 680

Who needs fans when you have copper and aluminum?

Fanless GPUs aren't anything new, and in fact, there's a rich history of low-power, low-profile graphics cards featuring all-passive cooling for servers and small form factor applications. But what if you could cool a flagship gaming GPU without a single fan? That's what the Colorful iGame GTX 680 aimed to accomplish. It's completely cooled passively, and as a result, features one of the strangest designs ever conceived for a graphics card. I mean, you can see the photo for yourself.

The GPU itself only takes up two slots, but wrapped around the card is another GPU's worth of thickness dedicated solely to passive cooling. On top of the GPU, there's a heatsink with seven heatpipes and a massive stack of fins. The strange bit is that Colorful added a second one of these heatsinks to the back of the GPU and connected the two halves with six heatpipes. I'm not sure if this GPU was ever actually released, but I don't believe it did. Colorful showed off the design at CES, but it doesn't seem the card ever hit store shelves.

1 Galaxy GTX 460 WHDI Edition

One of the first (and also last) WHDI products ever made

There's no other GPU to top this list than the Galaxy GTX 460 WHDI — the first (and to my knowledge, only) graphics card released with the WHDI, or Wireless Home Digital Interface, standard. If you're scratching your head about what in the world WHDI is, don't worry. You're not alone. It was an uncompressed wireless specification for display signals that used radio waves, and it first debuted around 2010, the same year that Nvidia's GTX 460 hit store shelves. Promising an uncompressed 1080p signal at 60Hz, Galaxy went about actually implementing WHDI into a graphics card.

The card came with a receiver that you would plug into power and your display. Then, the card would contact the receiver and send a signal. The receiver even came with a spare USB port, allowing you to hook up a keyboard and mouse wherever your display was and transfer the data back to your PC. It sounds like a quality and latency nightmare, but WHDI wasn't. Due to the fact that it used fixed radio signals, it had a range of more than 100 feet without line of sight, and it boasted sub-millisecond latency.

It sounds like a great solution for living room PC gaming, but just as quickly as WHDI rose to prominence, it fell out of favor. A planned second version of WHDI was never released, and the consortium maintaining WHDI that included companies like Asus was MIA within three years of WHDI's introduction. Amimon, the company that produced the technology for WHDI, is still around, though it mostly provides production equipment for wirelessly transferring video signals on film sets.