Pentium or MMX for V.

V2 SLI ~ V3 2000, so not sure if it's worth it.

V3 an average Pentium III. Voodoo 5 a Pentium III around 800 MHz or more. These cards scaling to the moon is a bit of a myth, maybe at 320 x 200, but play at 1024 x 768 and even the Voodoo 5 reaches the limit quickly.

Faster machines do give you better loading times and something nice features such as USB 2, on-board Ethernet, more USBs and those kind of things.

PhilsComputerLab wrote:

Pentium or MMX for V. […]
Show full quote

Pentium or MMX for V.

V2 SLI ~ V3 2000, so not sure if it's worth it.

V3 an average Pentium III. Voodoo 5 a Pentium III around 800 MHz or more. These cards scaling to the moon is a bit of a myth, maybe at 320 x 200, but play at 1024 x 768 and even the Voodoo 5 reaches the limit quickly.

Faster machines do give you better loading times and something nice features such as USB 2, on-board Ethernet, more USBs and those kind of things.

thanks for the fast reply. I am not going for usefullness here, but more like a Museum-type theme, I will be putting those systems on display not inside cases and I want them to be authentice on what would have been bought back in the day by a high-end user

Blinky wrote:

more like a Museum-type theme, I will be putting those systems on display not inside cases and I want them to be authentice on what would have been bought back in the day by a high-end user

So people will look inside and say, "Yep, those circuit boards have the right numbers on them" ? Are you expecting this to appeal to a lot of people..? But I suppose we already had that discussion in another thread.

If you're that concerned about authenticity, I suggest you consult some old PC magazines. Maybe you can get them framed and hang them next to your exhibits.

Voodoo1 (Diamond Monster 3D) Voodoo2 SLI (Creative Labs 12mb each) Voodoo3 (3000 currently, hoping to find a 3500) Voodoo 5 […]
Show full quote

Voodoo1 (Diamond Monster 3D)
Voodoo2 SLI (Creative Labs 12mb each)
Voodoo3 (3000 currently, hoping to find a 3500)
Voodoo 5

All these voodoos are to common and to cheap and not worth a mention to build some museum rigs. Try to find elusive boards from q3d. for example V1 sli, v2 agp etc, etc

Basically speaking, you are looking for what was the fastest CPU/Mobo combo, the month before the next card was released?
A bit like: The fastest P-II in Jan. 1998, because V2 is from Feb. 1998. Is this correctly understood?

I sence you have a plan, when talking about museum... Can you tell what your plans are?

brostenen wrote:

Basically speaking, you are looking for what was the fastest CPU/Mobo combo, the month before the next card was released?
A bit like: The fastest P-II in Jan. 1998, because V2 is from Feb. 1998. Is this correctly understood?

I sence you have a plan, when talking about museum... Can you tell what your plans are?

That's the idea...

I won't really be doing a museum, I just said that to give an idea on what I mean about authenticity and not really caring about fastest performance.

I WILL be putting them on display though, but for my personal hobby in my "playroom".
I don't care about super-rare either Anthony , I am not doing this for bragging rights nor for putting photos in here and trying to make people jealus just because they can't afford to buy the super-rare parts in ebay. That's not me.

What drives me is nostalgia of those ages and inability to build those PCs back then. I was born in 1984, started from a 80286 that was in the house with test drive 1, and my first "good" PC was a Pentium 90mhz that was my Xmas 1996 present. From there on started my PC hobby and I remember drooling over the Voodoo1 in magazines but couldn't buy it. My first 3dfx was the Voodoo2 much later than it was produced (a couple of months before V3 was introduced, late 1998).
So basically on one part I have nostalgia for those "golden" (for me) years of gaming and on another point, I'd like to build some machines around them because now it is very cheap to do so, just for fun/nostalgia/memories.
In the end those PCs will be scarcely used for gaming with appropriate ERA games and the reason I will put them on display, is because I dont have the space for 5-6 PC boxes, so I am thinking of mounting the motherboards on plexiglass pieces with cpu+ram+vga+sound+hdd and on the wall and then using a single PSU+monitor I can connect whichever I want to use at the time. This way I save space, and I can see the parts instead of having them hidden, but I don't really care for WoWing people, it's not like most of my pals would understand what this "junk" (in their eyes) is anyway...

The authenticity part stems from the idea that I'd like the machine to be as if I would have bought it back in the day supposing I had unlimited funds (within reason) so using the latest or 1 step down cpu etc. Moreover since there will be 4+ machines there is no reason for overkill since there will be pentium mmx + pentium2 + pentium3 etc, so no reason to max out an Asus P2b for example (with a PIII) when there will also be an Asus P3b with a PIII... better to spread the available speeds.

Voodoo1 - Pentium/Pentium mmx
Voodoo2 SLI - PII 450 if you plan on running stuff in 1024x768. PIII/Athlon 550Mhz+ if you want fps over resolution.
Voodoo3 - same as V2 sli
Voodoo5 - higher end PIII or Athlon, 800MHz+

Sounds like you are doing this a bit like I do then. Having machines from each era, made up from what were actually on sale for an affordable price at that time. Not to say that I do not have good parts. To me, the "party" stops when we hit the year 1999. Excepted a few items from up to 2002, I have no real interrest in the XP era. My point of focus, are a bit different than you. I like to have my own personal "working" museum, that shows off how the hardware has evolved from around 1985/87 and to 99/00. It is the jurney from the standalone-nerd-machine to the familys-everyday-internet-tool wich are my focus point. By working museum, I am talking about starting the machines up, each one, for aprox 30 minutes every second month. Just to play a bit around with, an to make shure they are still fitt and working ones. The main fun is as allways the build and benchmarking, to make something that works. Not to play countless hours of gaming.

So yeah... I truely get you on this. 😀

I rembember that somebody has posted some curves where you can see the scaling with different CPUs for the voodoos 1, 2 and 3.

Does anybody rembember and can post the link maybe?

Edit:
Have found these data...
Voodoo 1 CPU & VGA Limitations
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/94628483/ … g%20project.pdf

You could buy the latest and greatest CPU, a Pentium II 233 through 300 in May of 1997 so that would have been the fastest CPU around during the time the Monster 3D (V1) was the hotness.

Voodoo1 - Pentium/Pentium mmx or K6-2
Voodoo2 SLI - High end PII or early PIII
Voodoo3 - PIII 550mhz or better. (750 Coppermine is what I'd start with)
Voodoo5 - PIII 1ghz or better.

The voodoo5500 really does well with faster cpu's, I had one in a P4 system for the longest time.
Played battlefront, AoE3, and BH4 on it. even HL2.

Jade Falcon wrote:

Voodoo1 - Pentium/Pentium mmx or K6-2
Voodoo2 SLI - High end PII or early PIII

Hmm, looking at phil's VGA database, the K6-2 matches the pentium MMX (with 233MHz to 266 MHz), and with the high clocks (with 450MHz to 550 MHz) you are faster but do not reach the high end pentium II's concerning heavy FPU based software.

Depending on the installed VGA card, you match a PII 350 with a K6-2 500/550. Yes, a high end PII-450 is faster, but i am thinking that way:

How much faster is the high end K6-2 to P-MMX or how much slower compared to high end PII.
How much is the gap between voodoo1 to voodoo2 SLI. From what i saw in benchmark its huge! So at the end, it depends on scaling over different generations P5 and P6 architecture and what was time accurate at that time...

I went for the cpu's in my sig, ofcourse there is some overlap in the systems but they are all nicely balanced. The voodoo2 sli will be a lot faster in a p3 but they do run very well on the k6-3+.

So sorry to necro-post, but I hope this thread isn't too old to post on. Would a single Voodoo 2 paired with an athlon 700mhz choke? Or would that be an ok system? I have a pentium 2 and a pentium 3 I can throw it in. Though I was really wanting to pair it with the 700mhz...hypothetically.

A single Voodoo2 is fine for Glide games at 800x600, and a 700 MHz Athlon is twice as powerful as anything that would've been paired with the card originally. That CPU could use a better graphics card for higher resolutions and later 1999-2000 material.

What type of system would you recommend for a Voodoo 2?

Any machine you want to play Glide games on, from P1 up to maybe Athlon XP. Just pick a decent later graphics card to pair with for general D3D/OpenGL use. The only concession you make with the V2 in the system is degraded image quality, if connecting your display to the main graphics card through the Voodoo2 instead of switching outputs.

Performance wise, a PII-400 will already utilize 95-100% of what the single card can give, in almost any game.

dosquest wrote:

What type of system would you recommend for a Voodoo 2?

I used a K6-3/400 for my single Voodoo 2.

I use a voodoo 2 SLI in a PII-450 although it will likely perform well or better on a PIII katmai aswell.
Voodoo 3 were usually put in either the SS7 or PIII computers.