get an AGP one 😀
Those were much more common. The downside of the AGP one and the reason the PCI ones are much more sought after is that the AGP card only works with AGP slots that have a certain voltage. They won't fit in newer motherboards and most likely will fry if you force them 😀

Thanks for your reply.

Yes i've been in contact with ths guy who is selling it on ebay and he has refused my latest offer of £85 says he's had lots of offers from people in europe and wants me to make him an offer he can't refuse.

I would get an AGP one but the Pentium 3 system i bought off ebay has an integrated AGP Trident Blade 3D on it so no AGP slot, i'm thinking maybe i should just forget it and get a voodoo 3 PCI or geforce 2 MX PCI for much cheaper and use the money for something else for my retro PC, i've already bought a MT-32 sound module for just £11.50 which is on it's way.

It's very unlikely to exceed £85. Your best option is to bid in the normal manner. Chances are you will win, and you'll get it for about £60-£70. Say you lose, and it goes for £90+, then you've done yourself a favour, as it's not worth this amount.

I've seen about 7 or 8 of these appear on ebay over the last 12 months. None have sold for more than about £65+. The fact that this one is boxed and comes with a CD, cable and booklet...quite frankly who cares? The card's the only important thing. And the ones I spotted over the last 12 months - the majority of them were boxed and complete.

Are you knowledgeable enough to change your mobo? Cos if you are, why not get one with an AGP slot, and grap an AGP voodoo card, as @Dominus suggests? Alternatively, consider getting a PCI-based V3 instead. They're very good cards! And they don't make a horrible noise like the V5s do.

Whatever you decide to do, good luck! BTW, what games are you intending to play on this new old rig of yours? Glide stuff?

Thanks for your informative reply.

Yes i think i will bid the normal manner if i still decide i want it though he does say he has had an offer of £90 from this guy in the czech republic, he might be trying to get me to make a really high offer.

Yes i`m quite knowledgeable when it comes to PC's as i have built many PC systems in the past, i bought this system on ebay and thought it looked good and was nice & cheap,

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewIt … em=120391870899

I think the case might be too small to install a bigger motherboard so i think i`ll stick to what i have.

I have many parts lying around from an old P150 system i bought in 1996 which stopped working a few years back, i've taken it apart since and kept the matrox millenium 1, 3dfx orchid righteous voodoo 1, AWE 32 ISA and i bought two voodoo 2 12MB cards about 5 years back off ebay, i just want to try an all in one graphics solution as well.

Yes i want to play glide games and windows 98 direct 3d/open gl games and of course SVGA Dos games which some of the more demanding ones require a P3 of around 500 to 600 MHZ so wanted one not much faster.

I will need to install Windows 98SE on it and i`m looking forward to testing the AGP integrated Trident Blade 3D out, Trident graphics card i know aren't that great but i was checking the net and back in 1999 it wasn't too bad and was supposedly better than trident cards before that, i also want to test out it's SVGA dos games capabilities.

You got a good deal on that P3 system! 😀

Is it possible to use your Voodoo 2 SLI combo with the integrated Trident graphics card? (If so, you'll still have that ISA slot handy for the AWE32.)

You can use the V2 with practically anything else. I never liked those pesky inegrated AGP setups when the didn't provide a slot. they just use the AGP intface to the chipset but most chipset suck. The worst are the kind with shared system ram. total garbage IMHO.

retro games 100 wrote:

The fact that this one is boxed and comes with a CD, cable and booklet...quite frankly who cares?

Unfortunately, a lot of people (read: 3dfx freaks) do care. "New" and sealed V5 5500 are always much more expensive then retail package of just the card w/ or without drivers. If its sealed - I dont think it will go for under 150e. People dont buy sealed cards for actual use, but for display in a glass cupboard 🙁

I've known a guy who owns a working V5 6000 and which he doesnt use. When asked why - he answered that he's afraid that the rare card might break... So what? It can be used for "cupboarding" either working or not... But eh... People are strange.

3dfx fanaticism is a curious thing. I think these are people who kinda ignored most of the other interesting accelerators that were around during those years. They latched onto the "3dfx phenomenon", glorious era of proprietary Glide joy, and want to reminisce over those 3-4 years with a Voodoo on their wall. 😉

3dfx fanaticism is a curious thing. I think these are people who kinda ignored most of the other interesting accelerators that were around during those years. They latched onto the "3dfx phenomenon", glorious era of proprietary Glide joy, and want to reminisce over those 3-4 years with a Voodoo on their wall.

watch your steps now...
I'm one of those... I'm actually thinking of ripping a chip off either my V2 or my V5 and make a necklace out of it 😀

lolz. well I guess I'm ok with a Voodoo necklace.

Voodoo necklace is neat, as long as the chip is ripped from an already dead card. 😵

^^ a friend already has a keychain of a VSA-100 😉
I'm also a king of a "3dfx freak" but not as big as to get a card thats not going to be used. My voodoos are all up and running. Either V1 / V2 SLI in C2D system or V5 and V3 3500 in retro rigs 😉 And 3dfx did have much better support and superior graphics quality at that time. Up to GF series 8 (8600/8800) there was not a single GF or Radeon that could match 3dfx Anisotropic filtering. The difference between 3dfx display and classic NV of that time can be easily explained in this form:
Playing on NVIDIA was like being shortsighted (lets say -2), without glasses. Playing on 3dfx was like putting the glasses on and finally seeing things sharp.

If you've got a couple of Voodoo 5s, how about a matching pair of "3dfx soccer shin pads"?

If you have enough of them, how about full body plate armour? Imagine if you could power up all of those fans. As well as going a bit deaf, you could float about like a Dark Trooper.

I have a totally awesome keychain with a PowerPC 601 inside. Got it from an IBM booth at a job fair ~10 years ago. Not as exciting as a Voodoo die though I guess. heh 😀

I suppose I should expand on my opinion of 3dfx. I was maybe a bit too negative before.

In the amazing video card retro drawer at home, I have:

• Orchid Righteous 3D (Voodoo Graphics)
• Intergraph Intense 3D Voodoo (Rush)
• 2x STB Blackmagic 3D (Voodoo2)
• Voodoo3 2000 AGP and PCI
• Voodoo5 5500 AGP

I love me Voodoo cards deeply. But none of 'em cost me even $100 except for the Orchid Voodoo in 1997!!! That card was about $170 back then. The Voodoo2s and 3s were free cuz friends gave them to me once they were deemed useless to them. I think I paid $40 for the Voodoo5 and like $10 for the Rush. Once upon a time, I got myself a very cheap ($20 or so) Quantum 3D 100SB off ebay. The seller didn't know what he had. It was interesting to play with a bit, being a Voodoo1 SLI card, but a Voodoo2 was prettier and faster and had much better drivers anyway. So I sold it back on ebay and made like $100 on it haha. 😉

My favorite 3Dfx-related productions are probably the arcade cabinets. The boards from Midway and the awesome Rush games. Other than that the most memorable thing from 3Dfx for me is Voodoo1 running Unreal and perhaps Hexen 2.

If anyone wants see some seriously impressive retro PC 3D, check out Indycar 2 on a Verite V1000 with the Speedy3d patch. Fully anti-aliased rendering at a very nice speed. The original Verite was terrible for D3D, but when the devs used Speedy3D, it could definitely deliver. Anti-aliasing is a rendering feature that should be used for every game made instead of almost completely ignored.

retro games 100 wrote:

If you've got a couple of Voodoo 5s, how about a matching pair of "3dfx soccer shin pads"?

If you have enough of them, how about full body plate armour? Imagine if you could power up all of those fans. As well as going a bit deaf, you could float about like a Dark Trooper.

😳 L O L !!!! 😁 🤣 😁

I dont know if comments like these are alowed but I had to! 😅

elfuego wrote:

Up to GF series 8 (8600/8800) there was not a single GF or Radeon that could match 3dfx Anisotropic filtering.

You mean FSAA. VSA-100 only supports Trilinear Filtering.

Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman wrote:

elfuego wrote:

Up to GF series 8 (8600/8800) there was not a single GF or Radeon that could match 3dfx Anisotropic filtering.

You mean FSAA. VSA-100 only supports Trilinear Filtering.

No, I meant what I said. Anisotropic filtering was in fact equivalent to LOD bias on 3dfx hardware. Set it to -8 and you got yourself something thats sharper then Anisotropic 16x on most current hardware. Only GF 8 series and later could match its quality.

P.S. FSAA is blurring; LOD bias is sharpening - thats quite different 😉

LOD bias just forced the Voodoo to choose to choose the mipmaps with the lowest level. This is not AF, although the effects might be similar.

You could get ugly texture aliasing (swimming) out in the distance. It would be as if you turned off mip mapping, like with some of the early awful 3D cards that couldn't do mip mapping at all (see Mystique).