Hi again, I see this topic has turned into an interesting point of retro pc history 😀. And yeah, the interview I was talking about the other day is indeed this one from Youtube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MghYhf-GhU). I had the opportunity to listen at it (really interesting) and summarizes some of the points you guys were talking about: mainly the acquisition of STB (and the end of the partnership with board makers that moved to Nvidia) as the most important reason for 3Dfx bankruptcy. I'm learning lots of facts these days, love this hobby!
Following topic, when I arrived home from my trip today in the morning I found this beauty in the mailbox waiting for me to test 😀 :
So I installed it in my 'test machine' (the SS7 board that is not mounted in the case 🤣) and got very impressed, at first with the video output quality. I don't know why, but with the Geforce it is clearly worse and blurry at least when used in these particular systems. It doesn't happen, however, in newer systems (the VGA image quality of both the GF2 and the Fx5200 is perfect on the Athlon XP as it should be), so first doubt is more clear now: these cards are not the best for really early AGP systems, at least for SS7 in these particular boards (Ali). Still don't know the source of the blurriness, but that's it. We were expecting this, anyways: Not a great idea to re-use stored boards here 🤣
Talking about games: it's also confirmed (as you also said) that both V2 and V3 are quite overkill due to (the lack of) power from the CPU, and that Glide is better when available in slow machines. However, I found that V3 image quality is a bit better. Performance is, at first sight, the same for the two cards because both are limited by the cpu and it's shown in the few games I had the chance to try today. I also appreciated that this card heatsink gets extremely hot, so it may be OK to use Phil's method and add a silent fan on top of it (thank you Phil for the guide!)
So I'm thinking about swapping the Geforce+V2 'inappropiate' combo for the V3 in the built system, launch a few more games and test it better during the weekend. I think I'll enjoy it more because I don't have to swap video outputs anymore and finally uninstall 3D control center to use one card or another, which is annoying. And I'll save the V2 for a future and more powerful project!
Still have to test it further, but I'm pretty happy with this card 😀