What, no 3DFX logo on the case? meh...

Though those Obsidian cards look impressive! But still, 2k and not even a harddrive? Not even tested?!?
But at least it's a noble attempt, right?

Here's some video demos of this thing in action

http://wn.com/Quantum3D

geesh, starting to look like the price manic mania on Amiga hardware

Voodoo cards have always been ridiculously expensive.
Quite "awesome" tho how the seller asks for such a high price even tho he "doesn't know what use it has" and the set up being incomplete.

But then again ... those Quantum3D machines are pretty much the holy grail of any halfway serious 3dfx collector

yay for untapped power!

I wouldn't mind getting my hands on one of those AAlchemy boards separately. You can probably tie together any 4 Voodoo 2 card via the SLi connectors using it and install it in any PC with 4 PCI slots. Can you imagine how they must scale? They'd probably still be scaling with a C2D processor.

sliderider wrote:

I wouldn't mind getting my hands on one of those AAlchemy boards separately. You can probably tie together any 4 Voodoo 2 card via the SLi connectors using it and install it in any PC with 4 PCI slots. Can you imagine how they must scale? They'd probably still be scaling with a C2D processor.

You can't sli 4 V2's together in any other way?
All I could find on the net is info about how to sli 2 V2's.

Tetrium wrote:

sliderider wrote:

I wouldn't mind getting my hands on one of those AAlchemy boards separately. You can probably tie together any 4 Voodoo 2 card via the SLi connectors using it and install it in any PC with 4 PCI slots. Can you imagine how they must scale? They'd probably still be scaling with a C2D processor.

You can't sli 4 V2's together in any other way?
All I could find on the net is info about how to sli 2 V2's.

I don't think so. I think the AAlchemy board has some logic on it that makes it possible otherwise you could just use a long ribbon cable with 4 connectors on it.

Edit: Now that I take a closer look, I'm not sure that's how they connect at all. It doesn't look like the boards have the standard SLi connector on them. This is probably some special arrangement. The individual boards look more like the one used for the Obsidian2 X-24 than for the standard Voodoo 2's.

It actually looks like the AAlchemy board connects to the small header in the upper left. If you had the space between the cards it might be possible to do an 8-way SLi using X-24's if you could find and afford to buy 4 of them.

I found out after further research that the AAlchemy setup uses the successor to the X-24 that puts the dual V2's on a single board rather than using a daughter card so it actually IS an 8 way SLi setup. That would have been seriously amazing for gaming back in the 90's. Most likely the AAlchemy Mercury setup was meant for CGI render farms or other commercial 3D apps rather than games because it would have been outrageously expensive for home use.

Nah it wouldn't be, because of the maaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaajor bottleneck. It would be as fast as a Voodoo 3500 perhaps.
Btw, would that raise the maximum resolution ?

F2bnp wrote:

Nah it wouldn't be, because of the maaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaajor bottleneck. It would be as fast as a Voodoo 3500 perhaps.
Btw, would that raise the maximum resolution ?

Probably true. You'd need a damn fast CPU to get the maximum performance out of 8 Voodoo 2's. A 1.5-2.0ghz P4 machine just about squeezes everything out of a 2 card SLi setup. 8 of them would probably still be scaling on a fast quad core CPU.

I bumped into a post made by Obi One kenobi (a Dutch guy who collects and knows a great deal about 3DFX cards) and he posted a picture of a very similar case. It was called a Mercury and was a dedicated commercially available Voodoo SLI Obsidian rig.

I think the Mercury and Aalchemy setups weren't used because of the framerate but because of AA they provided. And rather not for CGI render farms, where you needed high precision.

In the late 90s and early 2000s, similar systems were popular for high end arcade systems (HydroThunder anyone?) as well as flight sim systems.

It is a waste of money... It doesn't work under Windows98, no drivers for it. How many Glide2 games would work under NT?
Obsidian2 X-24 is the one you need.

Menkau_ra wrote:

It is a waste of money... It doesn't work under Windows98, no drivers for it. How many Glide2 games would work under NT?
Obsidian2 X-24 is the one you need.

It's just a collector thing.

I saw a Obsidian2 X-24 go for almost $200 the other day. REALLY all you need is a pair of any V2 boards that you can find easily under $50. 😜

$200 for boxed X-24 was extremly cheap!
I've had many different Quantum3D cards. They are very cool COLLECTABLE boards. I still have some, but all collecting dust now 😉 even Aalchemy 8264 server... There was a guy who wanted to wright a Glide2 driver for it, but he had some problems with his life and he's got lost.

bushwack wrote:

Menkau_ra wrote:

It is a waste of money... It doesn't work under Windows98, no drivers for it. How many Glide2 games would work under NT?
Obsidian2 X-24 is the one you need.

It's just a collector thing.

I saw a Obsidian2 X-24 go for almost $200 the other day. REALLY all you need is a pair of any V2 boards that you can find easily under $50. 😜

If all you want is to experience what V2 Sli was like back in the day, yeah, but the X-24's were rare even back then because not many people thought it was worth $200 more than 2 V2's in Sli just to save 1 PCI slot. A year later and the V3's were on store shelves and ran at almost the same speed as a pair of V2's and only used 1 slot instead of three because it had 2d onboard, so the window of time where the X-24 would actually have been useful was small and the price was too high for most people to justify. It looks like the short sightedness that was going around at 3DFX like a plague was passed along to Quantum3D, too.

Menkau_ra wrote:

$200 for boxed X-24 was extremly cheap!
I've had many different Quantum3D cards. They are very cool COLLECTABLE boards. I still have some, but all collecting dust now 😉 even Aalchemy 8264 server... There was a guy who wanted to wright a Glide2 driver for it, but he had some problems with his life and he's got lost.

That's what I said. The last one I saw was at some online store back in December for $400 and that was AFTER it had been marked down 20 or 25% as part of a storewide Christmas sale. It's probably back up to $500 by now if someone didn't buy it already. The one I saw prior to that was about 2 years ago and was around $600. Back around 2004 you could have picked one up unboxed for $50 because nobody wanted them and few people realized how rare they were. The one I linked to in another thread was even more rare due to the fact that it had the optional cooling fan attached which added another $49 to the already ridiculously high for 1998 price of $599 and it was needed. The X-24 is noted for it's high heat output and glitchiness even at factory clocks once they get warmed up.

Here's the one that sold on ebay recently

This went for cheap.