I had an All-in-Wonder 128 Pro, which destroyed the poor Via chipset in our Compaq crapfest of a machine. I also used that card in a Pentium 200MHz machine.
From there, had an FX 5200 on a single thread P4. It wasnt until I upgraded that to a Radeon 9600 that I realized it was the system completely holding performance back, as it delivered no uplift whatsoever in Halo, Killing Floor, etc.
From there, HD 6870 with my 2500K; even ran dual cards for a while before understanding that SLI/Crossfire was essentially dead, and upgraded to a 4GB RX480, which does the job today. If I ever upgrade my desktop, the 480 will go in it and one of the 6870s will be used when I convert it to an XP retro machine.
I also have a Gigabyte BRIX GB-BXA8-5557 with HD 8550G, which does far better than its physical profile suggests. To any owners of this model - reverse the fan direction and give it a rethermal and it quiets down *considerably*.