grabisoft wrote:

I'm. planning in building my own semi retro gaming pc. I currently own two voodoo2 for sli and I got two motherboards. […]
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I'm. planning in building my own semi retro gaming pc.
I currently own two voodoo2 for sli and I got two motherboards.

one motherboard sports a pentium 4, 2.80 ghz, 512 800, sl6wt

the other one has a pentium d, 820 sl8cp, 2.8 ghz 2m 800

will the pentium D processor burn the voodoos? thanks

Is this really a thing? I have a V3 AGP and it's completely GPU limited on a Celeron-1400, even at 640x480. And at 1024x768, performance stops scaling right around the P3-550E mark. I haven't tested it on a P4 or A64 platform, but I would imagine that, instead of running hotter, it would just perform exactly the same as it does on the celeron-1400.

Dunno if V2s work differently, but I just find the idea of a GPU from 1998 scaling to the moon on a modern platform a little far fetched.

There is a myth that says that 3dfx' stuff up to the voodoo 2 or sometimes 3 are making more heat when running if faster PCs. This is supposed to NOT be directly related to the number of frames the card will display

But I never tested that so I can't confirm or infirm that

Well........ I had to replace a single voodoo2 after having it in a Pentium 4 while using "Fastvoodoo" drivers.

I think i've learned my lesson the hard way. Either "don't use in p4" or "don't make a habit of using 3rd party "fast" drivers"

Standard Def Steve wrote:

Dunno if V2s work differently, but I just find the idea of a GPU from 1998 scaling to the moon on a modern platform a little far fetched.

A lot of 3dfx is farfetched in general, it's the next thing to the Amiga as cult hardware status in europe and how it's somehow the best card ever because a Mesa driver can get it to tolerate Doom 3. 3dfx's aggressive SEGA-like marketing in their day also has this effect, and many of the low speed they've experienced in the 3dfx heyday has a lot to do with CPU bottleneck (i.e. unrealengine games). Other cards will have similar scaling (PowerVR PCX2 for example can hit over 60 in Unreal at 320x240 when it couldn't at all in 1998, it doesn't mean it's a super untapped potential video card that's super holy rendering the Geforce2 GTS moot )

leileilol wrote:

Well........ I had to replace a single voodoo2 after having it in a Pentium 4 while using "Fastvoodoo" drivers. […]
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Well........ I had to replace a single voodoo2 after having it in a Pentium 4 while using "Fastvoodoo" drivers.

I think i've learned my lesson the hard way. Either "don't use in p4" or "don't make a habit of using 3rd party "fast" drivers"

Standard Def Steve wrote:

Dunno if V2s work differently, but I just find the idea of a GPU from 1998 scaling to the moon on a modern platform a little far fetched.

A lot of 3dfx is farfetched in general, it's the next thing to the Amiga as cult hardware status in europe and how it's somehow the best card ever because a Mesa driver can get it to tolerate Doom 3. 3dfx's aggressive SEGA-like marketing in their day also has this effect, and many of the low speed they've experienced in the 3dfx heyday has a lot to do with CPU bottleneck (i.e. unrealengine games). Other cards will have similar scaling (PowerVR PCX2 for example can hit over 60 in Unreal at 320x240 when it couldn't at all in 1998, it doesn't mean it's a super untapped potential video card that's super holy rendering the Geforce2 GTS moot )

thanks for your advice. but you think using two voodoo2 will stand more temperature? pentium D would be too much? I'm planning on using a solid state hard drive with 2 gigs of ram and windows millenium. but the possibility of burning the video cards kind of scares me in this project

No faster cpu will make any 3dfx video card run hotter. Thats all nonsense.
The cpu's speed has nothing to do with how hot a video card runs. That has to do with power draw and load, a faster cpu will not magically increase the amount of power any video card can pull nore will it magically make it go past 100% load. I had a voodoo 2 sli setup in a x58 system a ways back, never had one problem with heat.
I also had a voodoo2 in a amd Athlon x2 system befor too.

V2 is running much cooler if I put in my Pentium MMX system instead of P4 or Athlon XP. Maybe it is because of serious CPU limitation (GPU is not running at full power), maybe there is some difference in PCI implementation on newer chipsets... who knows. The fact is V2 / especially SLI / is running quite hot and sometimes even tends to lock up because of overheating. So it is a good idea to have a good airflow and maybe use some extra fan. I even built my own case with this in mind and mounted two 80mm fans to the side to keep V2 SLI running stable and cool. Re: My retro rigs

I think the theory is pretty simple: they can overheat because with such fast cpu's you push the cards into 100% load ALL the time. And that would be a task even for a more modern graphics card that is passively cooled. And voodoo2 (most of them) do not even have a heatsink.... AND sli is 2 times the heat.

So yeah, always cool your voodoo2 cards, even in slow systems. I don't think there will be any problem with fast cpu's if they get good cooling.

Ok everybody, thanks for your opinions. I really appreciate them.

I finally decided to use the pentium D dual core. So far, i manage to assemble the system today.(had a couple of issues concerning CRT monitor recognition and some weird motherboard energy problems).

Next, i will install Windows ME. And the finally try the Voodoo2 SLI cards in that. I will report back with the results. If i get any.

Why WinME?
WinXp + Voodoo2 SLI works ok with retail W2k 1.02.00 drivers after you set gpio and gpcpl services to the system level.
I have used this method up to G45 + C2D 8400 combo.

You can't Direct3D with a V2 on 2000 or XP.

leileilol wrote:

You can't Direct3D with a V2 on 2000 or XP.

Yes you can.
3dfx Voodoo2 1000 V1.00.00b Support dx in 2k, sort of.

Then theres this monster of a project
https://www.3dfxzone.it/enboard/topic.asp?TOP … o2,,direct3d,Xp

About three years ago, Just for the lawz I put pair of V2 in SLI in my core i7 2600 build. Ran fine. I even got it working under Win 7 64 (I don't remember how though)

Can't use it for D3D, but OpenGL works fine. As well as Glide.
I used that setup to play TombRaider 1 in a modded dosbox exe that passed through the glide api calls to the real cards.
It was weird as f*ck but it mostly worked!

I tried later on WinXP and it worked great.
I need to find those cards and try that again... it'd probably make a great Youtube vid.

How did the voodoo2 sli preform in 7 64? I did a little tested a single voodoo2 in xp64 and 7 64 and found the 64bit drivers were abit slower.

Jade Falcon wrote:

How did the voodoo2 sli preform in 7 64? I did a little tested a single voodoo2 in xp64 and 7 64 and found the 64bit drivers were abit slower.

I only tried it with sli in w7 64 so I don't know how big of an improvement there was over running with a single v2, but it did run slower than when I was in XP on the same hardware, it also crashed more. I don't know if that was because the games didn't like win 7 or of the drivers were buggy.

It did seem to be stable with the few steam games that have glide support. Minecraft didn't like the V2 sli sadly.