VOGONS


Is a Voodoo 2 worth the cost

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Reply 20 of 120, by Jade Falcon

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candle_86 wrote:

I havn't bought any yet, gonna see if my I7 2600 can sell for enough to cover the cost of 2 of these cards. What type of cable would i use to make my own SLI cable

FDD cable, I forget what all needs to be done off the top of my head.

I may have a extra sli cable laying around, shoot me a PM with your address and I'll send it your way for free if you'd like. I don't need it and it will like only cost about $2.50 to ship it in your from TX.

Reply 21 of 120, by FFXIhealer

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With a floppy cable, you unfasten one end and then you carefully separate the middle 4 wires...the EXACT MIDDLE 4 WIRES. You have to flip them over so that those 4 wires are REVERSED on one end compared to the other. Then you reassemble that end carefully. If you did it right, you can plug that cable into both Voodoo2 cards and get SLI.

Side note: I picked up 2x STB V2-1000 12MB Voodoo2 cards from E-bay...exact same cards...but I swear they REFUSED to play nice together in SLI. It took a few months to come up with a solution: The FastVoodoo 4.6 drivers you can find here. Someone recommended I use that instead of the original drivers from the CD-ROM that came with the cards and they work. The thing is rock-solid stable and I get 1024x768 gaming resolutions.
Because of that, I ALSO upgraded my 350MHz Pentium II "Deschutes" to a 600MHz Pentium III "Katmai". My FPS on the Voodoo2s and the TNT2 card all shot up appropriately. That tells me that a lot of gaming at these card levels were heavily CPU dependent. And Phil's Computer Lab here did lots of Voodoo2 tests and with them in SLI, they scale all the way up past 1 GHz, so OF COURSE they are great with a Pentium III. Whoever said otherwise doesn't know what they're talking about or they want to be "period correct." By the time the Pentium III came out, the Voodoo3 3000 cards had already been released and they are ROUGHLY the same as 2x Voodoo2s in SLI...but the V2s scale upwards a bit better in SLI than the Voodoo3s do. Do a quick forum search for Phil's Computer Lab and I'm sure you'll stumble across his results thread. Show you want I'm talking about.

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Reply 22 of 120, by PhilsComputerLab

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FFXIhealer wrote:

And Phil's Computer Lab here did lots of Voodoo2 tests and with them in SLI, they scale all the way up past 1 GHz, so OF COURSE they are great with a Pentium III. Whoever said otherwise doesn't know what they're talking about or they want to be "period correct."

Nothing beats testing things out for yourself 🤣

I also use the FastVoodoo2 4.6 most of the time 😀

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Reply 23 of 120, by lazibayer

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candle_86 wrote:

I havn't bought any yet, gonna see if my I7 2600 can sell for enough to cover the cost of 2 of these cards. What type of cable would i use to make my own SLI cable

You can make it from a floppy cable.

Reply 24 of 120, by deleted_Rc

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FFXIhealer wrote:

With a floppy cable, you unfasten one end and then you carefully separate the middle 4 wires...the EXACT MIDDLE 4 WIRES. You have to flip them over so that those 4 wires are REVERSED on one end compared to the other. Then you reassemble that end carefully. If you did it right, you can plug that cable into both Voodoo2 cards and get SLI.

A picture sums up a 1000 words 😀
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FFXIhealer wrote:

Side note: I picked up 2x STB V2-1000 12MB Voodoo2 cards from E-bay...exact same cards...but I swear they REFUSED to play nice together in SLI. It took a few months to come up with a solution: The FastVoodoo 4.6 drivers you can find here. Someone recommended I use that instead of the original drivers from the CD-ROM that came with the cards and they work. The thing is rock-solid stable and I get 1024x768 gaming resolutions.
Because of that, I ALSO upgraded my 350MHz Pentium II "Deschutes" to a 600MHz Pentium III "Katmai". My FPS on the Voodoo2s and the TNT2 card all shot up appropriately. That tells me that a lot of gaming at these card levels were heavily CPU dependent. And Phil's Computer Lab here did lots of Voodoo2 tests and with them in SLI, they scale all the way up past 1 GHz, so OF COURSE they are great with a Pentium III. Whoever said otherwise doesn't know what they're talking about or they want to be "period correct." By the time the Pentium III came out, the Voodoo3 3000 cards had already been released and they are ROUGHLY the same as 2x Voodoo2s in SLI...but the V2s scale upwards a bit better in SLI than the Voodoo3s do. Do a quick forum search for Phil's Computer Lab and I'm sure you'll stumble across his results thread. Show you want I'm talking about.

Period corrrectness

PhilsComputerLab wrote:

I think most of us got their V2 cards from that guy 🤣

Most europeans got theirs from the local russian vendor selling stock SLI 3DFX voodoo 2 SLI packages 🤣

Last edited by deleted_Rc on 2017-02-26, 22:03. Edited 1 time in total.

Reply 25 of 120, by Davros

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Unreal's GlideDrv is much more polished and stable than the D3DDrv/OpenGLDrv drivers the patches ship with

true but there are 3rd party opengl renderers that allow you to use the compressed textures on cd2

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Reply 27 of 120, by deleted_Rc

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Errius wrote:

Why are these things so expensive now? Just 2 years ago prices were quite reasonable.

whats reasonable, friend of mine sold his locally for around €30,- each card he had (he had a voodo, voodoo 2, banshee and a voodoo 3), thats a few years ago. Most of the voodoo cards I aquired in the last half year were all around this price. Ebay is not a proper way to get prices from, some people just ask ridicilous prices and the rest follows to up the value. Amibay still sells the "cheap" there is a thread there currently someone selling a part of his graphics cards collection including alot of voodoo's.

Reply 28 of 120, by subhuman@xgtx

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Richo wrote:
Errius wrote:

Why are these things so expensive now? Just 2 years ago prices were quite reasonable.

whats reasonable, friend of mine sold his locally for around €30,- each card he had (he had a voodo, voodoo 2, banshee and a voodoo 3), thats a few years ago. Most of the voodoo cards I aquired in the last half year were all around this price. Ebay is not a proper way to get prices from, some people just ask ridicilous prices and the rest follows to up the value. Amibay still sells the "cheap" there is a thread there currently someone selling a part of his graphics cards collection including alot of voodoo's.

Looking In retrospective it's fun to see how there was a guy on eBay Canada about 5 years ago selling Obsidian2 cards for 50CAD a piece whist one nowadays comes across tons of listings from sellers asking even twice that for bare, beaten up, retail cards that sometimes cannot even be returned god do you happen to get a dud because they're listed 'as is'. 😵 Apart from the occasional bargain here or there, it's much better to get into trading forums like Amibay these days.

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Reply 29 of 120, by tincup

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candle_86 wrote:

...I don't want to put a Voodoo 3 or 5 in here as I will loose out on the preformance my Ti-4200 can give me in DirectX class games, which i why I was thinking Voodoo to get Glide if the wrappers don't work right....

That's the appeal of the V2 in a nutshell. As an add-on card it doesn't rob you of your primary video card (if that's an issue) but delivers the Glide goods for games that appeared in the heyday of 3dfx. From this perspective a single V2 should be sufficient. A true desire or real need for higher Glide resolution or performance logically drives you to a V3 or V5 solution as they really tromp V2-SLI, and most certainly with respect IQ.

I'd add a V2 to your P3 and relegate late generation Glide apps to a high power wrapper rig.

Reply 30 of 120, by KT7AGuy

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The prices for various Voodoo cards have gotten downright ridiculous over the past 4 years. The only model still somewhat reasonably priced is the Voodoo 3 AGP.

The GF4 Ti4200 is a really excellent video card. I like them alot. Last year I built a Win98SE PC for a young relative and put a GF4 Ti4200 in it. For games that needed GLIDE, I used either DGVoodoo or Zeckensack's wrapper. It worked just fine. In some cases, it worked better than using a real Voodoo card.

If you insist on having real hardware GLIDE support, I humbly submit this idea: Get a Voodoo 3 PCI card and install it alongside your GF4 Ti4200. Enable it on an as-needed basis. It will cost less than a pair of Voodoo 2 cards in SLI-mode while performing better and delivering better image quality. The only downside is the slightly more complex configuration required to make this work.

Reply 31 of 120, by elod

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I would say barely, if you have a 3dfx fetish or want to invest in old silicon it might.

I bought 2 Voodoo 3s though, those are more useful and they were a bit cheaper than the V2s. Voodoo 1 is even less appealing to me (priced the same). I'm talking about ~20 euros with extremely low (local) shipping rates.

Reply 32 of 120, by Tetrium

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Why would Voodoo 1 be as expensive as Voodoo 2? Only because it was the first Voodoo perhaps?
They aren't even rare and their use was much more limited compared to Voodoo 2.

Voodoo 3 is a good card and more available than Voodoo 4 and 5 (was Voodoo 4 ever really available? 🤣).

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Reply 33 of 120, by meljor

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Voodoo1 is the most compatible 3dfx card. For v2 and later there are some games that need extra patches (especially for v3 and up) and v1 simply works.
Lots of people here had trouble to get games like screamer2 and screamer rally going for example on a v2 or v3.
V1 it is simply install the glide patch and go.

V1 had the biggest impact on me when it comes to 3d games in the 90's and i still love them (but i like every voodoo).

V1 : first, most compatible
V2 : cool as it can do sli!
V3 : good allrounder, v2 sli speed
v4 : V3 that can do 32bit color and 2xAA
V5 : V2, V3 and V4 in one card: it has sli, is a good allrounder and can do 32bit color and even 4xAA

So basicly a lot of voodoo's can replace others but none can replace v1 🤣

There are VERY few games that only work on v1 and it is not a real issue. there also is no best voodoo choice. But money wise the v3 is still the best choice: Fast, sharp image, very glide compatible and easy to find pretty cheap.

Prices of 3dfx cards are becoming insane, are they worth it? You can ask that question for ANY old part and only you can aswer that question.... it's like asking if red is a beautiful color.

asus tx97-e, 233mmx, voodoo1, s3 virge ,sb16
asus p5a, k6-3+ @ 550mhz, voodoo2 12mb sli, gf2 gts, awe32
asus p3b-f, p3-700, voodoo3 3500TV agp, awe64
asus tusl2-c, p3-S 1,4ghz, voodoo5 5500, live!
asus a7n8x DL, barton cpu, 6800ultra, Voodoo3 pci, audigy1

Reply 34 of 120, by KT7AGuy

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meljor wrote:

Prices of 3dfx cards are becoming insane, are they worth it? You can ask that question for ANY old part and only you can aswer that question....

I think they're still worth it, but you need to be smart about it. If I didn't already have my Voodoo 2 and 5 cards, I wouldn't be buying them now. To me, the price is way too high.

However, I still think that building a real hardware GLIDE machine is worth doing and can be accomplished at a reasonable cost:

440BX Motherboard $40
P3 650mhz Coppermine $10
256mb PC100 RAM $10
Voodoo 3 3000 AGP $40
Voodoo 1 PCI $40
AWE64 Value $20
HDD & DVD/CDROM $25
PC Case $Free (craigslist)

So, for ~$185US you can build a rather kickass GLIDE machine. When you want to run the Voodoo 1 card, just underclock the CPU to 429mhz at 66mhz FSB. Now you have full 100% GLIDE compatibility for not too much cash. I think this is still reasonable.

If you want even more power, find an i815 motherboard that allows you to set FSB at 66mhz, 100mhz, and 133mhz. Make sure you can also set AGP and PCI dividers. Then, get yourself a P3 Coppermine 866mhz CPU. You just need to find the right motherboard to make it all work.

I estimated these costs on the high end. You can still do this for much cheaper if you diligently search craigslist for freebies and are extremely patient.

Reply 36 of 120, by SPBHM

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I think the Voodoo 3 AGP is the more reasonable one, performs like a V2 12mb sli + good 2d card and it's much cheaper and simpler to use.

Voodoo 2 is interesting, but I don't think it should be worth as much, also it seems kind of fragile.

Reply 37 of 120, by Tetrium

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Thanks everyone for explaining 😀

I thought Voodoo 1 might be a bit too slow for newer games like Unreal. I was already aware that not all games that work on Voodoo 1 will work on Voodoo 2 or later (and that some will work after doing some fiddling around).

V1 : first, most compatible V2 : cool as it can do sli! V3 : good allrounder, v2 sli speed v4 : V3 that can do 32bit color and 2 […]
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V1 : first, most compatible
V2 : cool as it can do sli!
V3 : good allrounder, v2 sli speed
v4 : V3 that can do 32bit color and 2xAA
V5 : V2, V3 and V4 in one card: it has sli, is a good allrounder and can do 32bit color and even 4xAA

I like this! 😁

Though V4 is probably the easiest Voodoo one could do without (and one of the hardest to find).

Voodoo 3 AGP has been the "best buy Voodoo" for a long while now. It's weird seeing the prices of 3DFX stuff go up so much.

Btw Meljor, where would you put cards like Banshee and Velocity? 😜

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Reply 38 of 120, by meljor

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Tetrium wrote:

Thanks everyone for explaining 😀

I thought Voodoo 1 might be a bit too slow for newer games like Unreal. I was already aware that not all games that work on Voodoo 1 will work on Voodoo 2 or later (and that some will work after doing some fiddling around).

Btw Meljor, where would you put cards like Banshee and Velocity? 😜

Eh....On my shelf with the rest? 🤣 😎

Just kidding. Banshee is a great card as well but i never use one. It is just a higher clocked v2 that is slower when it comes to multi texturing with ofcourse it's own 2d. The velocity is basicly a v3 2000 for lower resolutions so should be fine for a lot of games as well.

asus tx97-e, 233mmx, voodoo1, s3 virge ,sb16
asus p5a, k6-3+ @ 550mhz, voodoo2 12mb sli, gf2 gts, awe32
asus p3b-f, p3-700, voodoo3 3500TV agp, awe64
asus tusl2-c, p3-S 1,4ghz, voodoo5 5500, live!
asus a7n8x DL, barton cpu, 6800ultra, Voodoo3 pci, audigy1

Reply 39 of 120, by elod

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This forum will make me bankrupt 😀.

I'm actually thinking about buying a V1 with Miro branding (identical design to the Canopus) just because it's odder than all the other V1 cards. No pass through cable but we can live without.

It will complement nicely with my PCI only S7/SS7 boards.