I remember buying my first 3D 'accelerator card' as they were called back then. It was a Voodoo Banshee card. The Banshee had an onboard 2D video chip, so it didn't have the VGA passthrough cable.
I bought the card at a trade show (the Dutch audience here will remember the 'HCC dagen'). That's where you could buy them cheap. Not sure if it was actually cheaper, internet wasn't very useful back then, so there was no easy way to compare prices.
I didn't have a computer of my own yet (I must have been 14 years old or so), so I bought it for our 'family' computer, an IBM P166. I remember getting up super early to put the card in before my dad would wake up. He would certainly have freaked out if he saw that I opened up the expensive computer to put it some gaming thing.
Good times.