I would say driver issues could be the prob.
Before you through away the card install the operating system again...

I just realised the voodoo 5 is agp2x and your motherboard is what. 4x or 8x... thats your issue. Electrically they are not compatible, but would help to know what m/b you have.

If we were talking about my AGP voodoo you'd be right, but that one is still stowed away. This is the PCI version. But yeah, AGP Voodoos were 3.3v (except V4 I think which was 1.5v) and therefore incompatible with the more modern 1.5v AGP 4x/8x slots. But it wouldn't even fit in the slot in that case, or at least it shouldn't.

As for this card, I wouldn't dare throw it away working or no. I'll test it in another computer ASAP but that may be awhile.

The PSU feeding it is 500w so that should be plenty of juice. With PCI video set as primary in the BIOS it still freezes. I'd like to think it's just not getting along with my finicky cheapo motherboard rather than being actually defective but for the moment I don't think there's any way I can tell.

Almost forgot to list the mobo, it's a Biostar P4M900-M4 which basically serves as life support for a Socket 478 3.4ghz Prescott.

Just to be on the safe side: Disable spread spectrum if you can in bios.

Just to be sure, you've connected the molex, right?

Yes, molex is connected. No power to card means nothing on screen and it DOES output to monitor... just freezes before I can really do anything!

I'll check the spread spectrum thing when I have some time later. I also had the idea last night of booting from a Linux LiveCD to see what happens. If it doesn't freeze then I should be able to rule out hardware as the problem.

I would also try out another PCI slot just in case, I've had no problems running my PCI Voodoo card on a Socket 478 motherboard and I'm pretty sure I've left the spectrum settings enabled/defaults on.

Well, some small progress. I'm typing from crunchbang linux running 1280 x 1024 off the Voodoo 5. I tried both Linux Mint and crunchbang LiveCDs with both returning "Greeting application has crashed" messages when it would try to initialize the desktop and the monitor seemed to cycle through video modes but only black screens were showing up.

Right before I was going to give up I tried crunchbang with the force vesa option, and I've been running off the card for 41 minutes. So there's still limited functionality here at least... I verified both fans are still spinning too so that's nice.

Late, I'll try performing more necromancy on my dead-ish Voodoo card tomorrow.

I have just made a video in which I rattle on for some minutes about my poor dead baby in the dark and display some frankly awful camerawork while it boots. If you can get through that there's some semi-good footage of the card itself at the end.

I'm out of ideas at this point, about ready to call time of death on this thing. Only thing still yet to do is test in another computer.

edit: video removed, I got it working. Seems there was a conflict with my obnoxious overpriced X-Fi sound card that prevented the OS from loading. Now I know I tried booting it at least twice without the sound card in there before but who knows what the problem was then. I had just flashed the card from 1.11 to 1.16 in a last ditch effort and to my amazement Windows loaded.

I got the default Microsoft XP driver installed and proceeded to run dxdiag. After running the directdraw tests I saw that no sound card was recognized. Looking down, sure enough the light on the card wasn't on; it had gotten gradually nudged out of its slot by cables same as the Voodoo earlier. Shut down, push the sound card back in, reboot... locks up at loading bar. Remove sound card... boots into desktop. Onboard sound ahoy!

I theorize that there might be some IRQ conflict that is unresolved by the BIOS here. Through Google I found this page where a fellow seems to have the same issue. Google also tells me that these X-Fi cards don't like to play nice with 'IRQ Sharing' which I'm guessing it's very likely my M-ATX mobo with only 2 PCI slots employs.

Anyway, the card is not dead and I'm thrilled for that. Thanks everyone who took a look at it! I'm off to investigate Glide-capable XP drivers.