The 8800 GT is easily the most impactful GPU in my mind. The combination of that video card with valve's Orange Box was insane value proposition at the time.
I'd put the 5700xt at #2 for being the longest lived GPU I've owned by a very wide margin. It's still in use today.
Came here for this ommission. I saved up for a long time to get an 8800 GTX, and I had that card for 5 years before upgrading again.
I retired my 5700 XT a few years ago. Wasn't there some kind of hardware problem with it? It kept locking up my Linux kernel.
Still using my RX 5700 XT. The amdgpu driver had a major issue resuming from suspend a few months ago[0], but other than that, I'm not aware of (nor have I experienced) any stability issues. Maybe you had a bad card.
0: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/amd/-/issues/4531
I don't like to spend much on hardware, so I bought an 5700XT a few years ago and run a "steam machine" of sorts. Never had any Linux-related problems.