3dfx Voodoo5 6000 article / review.

[Dputiger]

Normally I wouldn't do this, but I'm a long-time member of TechIMO (if no longer quite as active as I'd like to be) and I genuinely want to make sure people hear about this--I spent 3 months (and a year, on-and-off) writing the articles below and if people are interested I want them to see.

Part I: The History of 3dfx is here

Part II: The V5 6K review is here

Like I said--not wanting to troll or self-advertise--just hope you guys find this a great read.

Thanks for the articles. I'm a big fan of 3dfx myself.

[Dputiger]

My pleasure! Glad to be of service. ::bow::

[poopeyhed2]

Wow, it costed you $850? Is the money that you put in worth the investment?

[Dputiger]

It was to me. I loved 3dfx and I love owning unique things. This is one of the more unique things you can get in computing, though smuggling out some of the engineering samples AMD and Intel have built (1 meg cache AthlonXP's, 2 meg cache P4's, stuff like that) would be pretty cool. But then again, such engineering samples often have their own bugs.

Truth is, I was lucky. I got a fully-functional card you almost never see for sale.

[Redwolf]

GREAT article Joel. It's great to know that a card so bit IS in fact a fairly good performer. No telling what would have happened had 3dfx gone for DDR or RD ram (it would have raised the price tho, so sales may have been balanced out in the long run).

[poopeyhed2]

Finished reading the article, very nice work Did you mod the card yourself to have the molex connector for power from the PSU? What I want to see more on the market is something that 3dFX did like the SLI mode. Would be pretty interesting to see say 2 Radeon 9800 Pro chips onto one PCB... ATi did it once, with their Rage Fury Maxx, that was cool.

[Dputiger]

I didn't do the mod--the person I bought it from did. As to the SLI mode, ATI's Radeon 9800 Pro can be linked in up to a 256 GPU configuration, though God knows what 256 Radeon 9800 GPU's could do.

Lemme see...in terms of raw performance (assuming any degree of scalability) that should still be performing well in, oh, about ten years. ****, if 3dfx had produced an 8-way V5 (despite being immensely huge and probably over $1800 to purchase) it'd still offer competitive performance. Double V5 6K performance would be pretty fast.

(except of course for feature set)


*Edited* Profanity removed. KenKun/Moderator

[uncle_jimbo]

good read

[Tomteriffic]

Great article, very good writing! And a great insight into what coulda/shoulda/woulda been