@swaaye & @5u3,

Interesting info, thanks!

Just a quick note about the slightly poor image quality on the PC-based 3dfx Voodoo5500 PCI card - it was most noticeable on the Windows 98 installation screens - those predominantly blue and white, rather basic looking installation screens. Looking closely at the fonts used, the pixels in the letters appeared to be wobbling slightly. Certainly not rock solid, as with my other much less powerful old graphics cards.

Hmm, maybe the V5 generates a poor VGA signal. Does it change if you use a different cable/monitor?

Also, how much does one pay for a PCI V5 these days? I'm thinking of getting one for a future project, but prices seem to have gone through the roof lately. 😢

why would anyone want a PCI voodoo5 ? I had a PCI voodoo4 and the voodoo3 outperform it! I guess the PCI bus chocked the v5 chipset... or at least I think it does. 🤣
I have seen even modern cards that have poor output signal, mostly budget ones... a sparkle 8600GT has a blur image on CRT (perfect on lcd monitor though)

keropi wrote:

why would anyone want a PCI voodoo5 ?

4x RGSS FSAA 😁
(and the ability to run a faster AGP card alongside)

5u3 wrote:

Hmm, maybe the V5 generates a poor VGA signal. Does it change if you use a different cable/monitor?

Also, how much does one pay for a PCI V5 these days? I'm thinking of getting one for a future project, but prices seem to have gone through the roof lately. 😢

Re: cable/monitor change, I'll check that out as soon as I can.

Re: PCI V5, I can see one for sale about 1200km west to where you live. 😉 (cost wise, generally speaking, they seem to go for about 50+ euros.)

A V5500 PCI I was bidding on on Ebay got up to over $120. Too much for me. I got an AGP version for $20.

Yeah a Voodoo5 is definitely not exciting enough to get more than $30 or so from me. I suppose that might be different if I didn't have one and never had used one and was running on hype and imagined splendor. 😀

The best thing about Voodoo5 is the Glide support, IMO. Otherwise I'd go with a Radeon 9700/9800 or GeForce FX 5900 for older rigs. Way faster. The ATI cards have better filtering and anti-aliasing too. With Rivatuner you can even get supersampling from GeForce FX.

Actually I've discovered that my old'n'crusty X850 is a beast for older games. I even got the horribly buggy Star Trek DS9 Dominion Wars to run flawlessly, fast, and pretty on it.

You really want something that's not DX10 for the older games that only do 16-bit color. The DX10 cards don't do that color dithering anymore and they are just riddled with horrible color banding in such games as a result.

5u3 wrote:

Hmm, maybe the V5 generates a poor VGA signal. Does it change if you use a different cable/monitor?

I put the PCI V5 in to a completely different machine - new mobo, monitor & cable. At first, the image quality appeared worse. When booting up, the different "boot up screens" (including the BIOS information screens) were either affected with interference, or rock solid. Curious. I then reinstalled both the V5 driver and also the monitor "driver", and the image quality "settled down" quite a bit. In fact, the only screen which now seems affected by interference is the Windows 98 boot up splash screen. Everything else seems fine. 😀

5u3 wrote:

... Also, how much does one pay for a PCI V5 these days? I'm thinking of getting one for a future project, but prices seem to have gone through the roof lately. 😢

Have you managed to snag one yet? There's definitely something about owning a graphics card that sounds like a small gang of angry wasps.

Also, if you don't mind me asking, what is your (exciting retro) project?

Is jaba using a bong? Nice setup making me want build a retro system.

retro games 100 wrote:

Have you managed to snag one yet?

Nope, the French one was ~90 € incl. shipping, which is more than I would cough up for a V5.
There's another one in Germany, five days to go and already at 35 €. This one'll cross the 100 € mark easily...

retro games 100 wrote:

There's definitely something about owning a graphics card that sounds like a small gang of angry wasps.

For me those little fans are the most annoying features of the V5. I'm still searching for a quiet and reliable cooling solution. Read about my previous cooling attempt here.

retro games 100 wrote:

Also, if you don't mind me asking, what is your (exciting retro) project?

Nothing special, I'm just slowly beginning to collect hardware for a third retro machine. 😉
The V5 PCI will most probably be the most expensive part of it.

@5u3, have you tried ebay.co.uk? V5s sell for about £50 on that site, which is about the same value in Euros. Prices for retro equipment on ebay.de can be very expensive. I wonder if ebay.pl is a good place to look for one?

As you know I've tried a few cooling experiments with large case fans. Recently, I tested a socket 7 mobo whose BIOS had a "built-in" temperature display. I tested a Pentium 1 MMX 166, and the temperature reading eventually stopped rising, and stopped on about 34C, without me using a heatsink on it. The CPU had a fast but quiet 12cm fan directly over it. I wonder if you could remove both of those tiny fans on a V5, and then attach one or two big case fans to the PCB using elastic bands? Either 92mm or 12cm size. Leave the little heatsinks on, but just completely blast the whole board with lots of "case fan air". The larger the fan blades, the quieter they sound.

@RG100: I have used 80mm to 60mm ducts made of plastic to fit bigger fans to heatsinks. This way you can get with a quieter fan but still get a lot of air flow. 60mm is the size of most heatsinks so it makes a really good fit.

http://cgi.ebay.com/Fan-Case-Adapter-glows-Re … 1QQcmdZViewItem

Replaced Adaptec 2740AT is replaced by a speedy 2742W SCSI today

disk I/O speed doubled 😁

Hey, that's great to know. I have the same controller in my EISA 486, but I have a slow 2GB Barracuda attached, so I don't yet benefit from the extra bandwidth of wide SCSI.

Are you running your 5x86 at 133 or 160?

Anonymous Coward wrote:

Hey, that's great to know. I have the same controller in my EISA 486, but I have a slow 2GB Barracuda attached, so I don't yet benefit from the extra bandwidth of wide SCSI.

Are you running your 5x86 at 133 or 160?

I'm glad I didn't have to re-partition the drive after swapping SCSI card but I had to run the Eisa ECU for everything to work.

Running it at "stock" 5x33 = 133mhz

That's pretty sweet, a while ago I was looking for ISA cards with wide SCSI support and coudln't find any. I seriously wondering if they even existed. Even looking on google I couldn't find any pictures of them, maybe you should post one up.

That's pretty sweet, a while ago I was looking for ISA cards with wide SCSI support and coudln't find any.

They're talking about an EISA card, not ISA. I'm pretty sure there aren't any ISA wide-SCSI cards... ISA can't even do the 10MB/sec of Fast SCSI, so wide SCSI would be completely pointless.

I was thinking that but when I was searching around I thought I saw something about it being ISA. I guess the connector is the same shape so unless your looking at the contacts it would be heard to tell.

EISA slots are backwards compatible with ISA, so you can plug in a regular ISA card and have it work normally, that's probably where your confusion came from. Unfortunately it doesn't work the other way-- you can't use an EISA card in an ISA slot.

But yes, the EISA contact arrangement is wholly different... the connector is a bit taller than ISA, and there's a whole second row of contacts, staggered from the first row... same sort of arrangement as an AGP or Slot1 connector.