gdjacobs wrote:

vlask wrote:

Mine vote goes to AAlchemy 8164 with 512MB of memory. I guess thats dream card not only for 3Dfx collectors.... […]
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Mine vote goes to AAlchemy 8164 with 512MB of memory. I guess thats dream card not only for 3Dfx collectors....

Detailed info - http://www.thedodgegarage.com/3dfx/q3d_aa5_faq.htm

Don't forget the custom PSU required to drive that thing.

Custom PSU... I don't care/mind and won't have an issue with that. That card is a dreamer to have. 😜

Yup, you need a 2.9V rail.

mwdmeyer wrote:

Oh yeah I have an MSI mobo with 8mb Voodoo 3 onboard, runs pretty well actually.

Looks like the one on this page: http://www.thedodgegarage.com/3dfx/v3.htm

WOW....I never knew that there was ever a motherboard with onboard 3dfx. I WANT!!!!

old post

Wow, I had to be quite lucky then. I wanted to buy some Voodoo3 PCI (since I don't have AGP 2x slot on board), but they were either not available or outrageously overpriced here on eBay. And then I found out, that Voodoo4 was AGP 4x compatible, and there was one card on German eBay available in auction. And I won it 😀 And I won it for price, for which people here are selling theirs Voodoo2 card 🤣

I would like to own Voodoo5 5500 PCI in the future, but as people here already said, they are quite rare, and expensive...

Beware:

Only the retail 3dfx built Voodoo4 4500 AGP is 4xAGP 1.5V capable.
(the Powercolor Evilking Voodoo4 and the rare 3dfx Voodoo4 4500 "L" Shaped variants are confirmed to be 2xAGP 3.3V only)

Still a good score! Just double check which version it is.

Fortunately, it's reference design card from 3dfx, so regarding the AGP slot, I'm good.

I must say tho, the prices these days for 3dfx cards in general are quite unfriendly. On the other side, I understand it, since they are part of retro gaming history, and number of cards on market will only decrease.

Voodoo 1s may as well not exist in my region, but I've come across and bought multiple V2 and V3s in the last 2 years.

Does anyone here know why the village-tronic mac banshee-cards (MP750/850) do need their own! opengl-driver which is pretty crappy, very slow and incompatible, beside they are a real voodoo-banshee and should work with standard mac drivers, but they don't ?

http://www.thedodgegarage.com/3dfx/mac.htm

https://web.archive.org/web/20050306073407/ht … su_cl_down.html

GLRenderer beta
(unsupported and discontinued)

appiah4 wrote:

Voodoo 1s may as well not exist in my region, but I've come across and bought multiple V2 and V3s in the last 2 years.

My experience is similar. Actually, back in the days, I only saw 2 V1s installed in real machines.

By looking at the local second hand market for the last several years (I started buying second hand computer parts in 2009):

- V1 was rare, only a few showed up

- V2 was rare, but not as much as V1

- V3 was plenty and cheap, between 2009 and 2011 they were almost always available for acceptable prices

- V4 and V5 was non exisiting, never seen them to date in second hand sites.

To say the truth, I was not a keen follower of "what is available" all the time since 2009. This experience is based on an "on and off" kind of following up the on line sites.

dr.zeissler wrote:

Does anyone here know why the village-tronic mac banshee-cards (MP750/850) do need their own! opengl-driver which is pretty crap […]
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Does anyone here know why the village-tronic mac banshee-cards (MP750/850) do need their own! opengl-driver which is pretty crappy, very slow and incompatible, beside they are a real voodoo-banshee and should work with standard mac drivers, but they don't ?

http://www.thedodgegarage.com/3dfx/mac.htm

https://web.archive.org/web/20050306073407/ht … su_cl_down.html

GLRenderer beta
(unsupported and discontinued)

My Village tronic voodoo3 Mac does not work in a pc (don't have a mac to test). Could it be that they have a completely different bios to make it ''mac exclusive'' and therefor only work with their own driver? Just a wild guess, or actually it is more of a question 😎

So could you test the banshee in a pc?

I have a question which kinda fits here.
About 20 days ago, a very specific Voodoo2 appeared on a local advertising site. If you live in Croatia, you know which one it is.
In particular, it is the Britek ViewTOP Vulcan 2 12 MB, supposedly running at 125 MHz. Here's a photo from the listing:

The guy listed the card for an equivalent of €670. I thought there was no way in hell he's going to get anywhere near that.
However, he claims that he has already had an offer of around €400.
He also claims it to be the "only known unit in the EU", which I highly doubt.

Since I've never seen a Voodoo 2 sell for this much, I would like to ask: is this thing really that rare/valuable or is he just full of crap?
He is also selling a Pentium 100 for €50, so I think this supposed "offer" might be fake.

I think I will sell mine not under 1.000 USD 😀
https://www.flickr.com/photos/94839221@N05/35 … 57686042803086/

I'll see if I can track down pics of it, but in late 99/2000 I owned a Quantum 3D Obsidian2 S-12: as far as I know it's the only AGP Voodoo 2 card ever made. The machine I had it in housed my Matrox Mystique 220 w/Rainbow Runner and after I violently yanked my M3D out of it after getting pissed with the lack of alpha blend transparencies I found the S12 at a local computer shop for dirt cheap.

I'm pretty sure the pics I took of mine are on an old archive CD in my closet.

is this thing really that rare/valuable or is he just full of crap?

They are somewhat rare, but kinda useless. From my experience you can't push Voodoo 2 chips past 110-115mhz even with very efficient cooling. So while 110mhz EDO RAM could be useful in some cases, same thing can't be applied to 125mhz EDO cards. In fact you could just hit a brick wall at 105 mhz, regardless of installed RAM specs.

Is there anyone obsessed enough with retro overclocking to buy it without a solid proof? Doubtful, very doubtful.

The Serpent Rider wrote:

In fact you could just hit a brick wall at 105 mhz, regardless of installed RAM specs.

The way he worded it, I thought the core was pre-overclocked to 125 MHz, but that's obviously not the case.
I don't know much about Voodoos in general, just that core clock is tied to memory clock.
That makes this "killer feature" somewhat pointless.

Then again, if you're handy with soldering, you can potentially buy old stock of 125mhz EDO chips and make any Voodoo 2 "rare". Also you can add memory to a 8mb card, which was already proven here on Vogons.

My Quantum3D Mercury brick is one of the rarest pieces I've ever seen as it's the only known one in existence with this configuration. The black PCB's are from the early revisions while the heatsinks are from the later green PCB revision cards. 3 out of the 4 cards have 100MHz EDO while one of these cards even has the 125MHz EDO from the green revisions as well. These cards also have the very rare 546-0014-05 BIOS which has been seen before but not commonly.

For those of you that don't know what a Mercury brick is. In short.. It's 8 Voodoo 2 chipsets linked together (Each Quantum3D Obsidian 2 200SBi board has two Voodoo 2 chipsets in SLI) to produce a gorgeous image with 4 tap rotated grid full scene anti-aliasing. The performance is around the same of a standard Voodoo 2 SLI setup but the FSAA doesn't impact performance at all because 6 of the chipsets are dedicated to this functionality.

I'm currently working on getting it up and going and when I do I plan to make many videos of it running games and other cool demos (:

kanecvr wrote:

3DFX Rampage. No finished cards in existence as fast as I know, only a few unfinished engineering samples. Here's some pr0n of it:

Weird...there is an article literally from 2 days ago about it:
https://hothardware.com/news/3dfx-rampage-gpu … -20-years-later

doaks80 wrote:

kanecvr wrote:

3DFX Rampage. No finished cards in existence as fast as I know, only a few unfinished engineering samples. Here's some pr0n of it:

Weird...there is an article literally from 2 days ago about it:
https://hothardware.com/news/3dfx-rampage-gpu … -20-years-later

It's correct, those cards in the article are the unfinished proto types and the owner got one (or both?) working with some help from an old 3dfx engineer and by making a dongle for it that ''translates'' the colors the right way. The article is talking about performance and compares it to the geforce256 that wins. I think that's a bit lame as the Rampage drivers were far from finished, let alone optimized. It is just amazing to see that a working card exists.