aaronkatrini wrote on 2020-05-16, 16:21:

In the photo @imi uploaded there is a 3dfx Voodoo 3 3000 PCI.
You can tell from the big "silver-colored" aluminium heatsink and the tiny small heatsink on that Transistor on top it is a V3 3000.
The V3 2000 has a smaller "black-colored" heatsink, and the PCI variant also has that tiny small heatsink on that Transistor.

You're absolutely right, however I'm 100% convinced when I made my comment there was a 2000 with the smaller black heatsink there because I remember seeing the RAM chips on the right first. The ones that are now partially covered by the heatsink.
I also seem to remember an 1.0 BIOS revision on the sticker.
I know it's possible to edit posts without the edit being noted underneath the post if you do it pretty fast, so...
Did you change the picture after you first posted it, imi? Or am I going insane? 😁

Edit: I also remember his post explicitly talking about his Voodoo3 2000 PCI. Please, help me out here, imi! 😁

aaronkatrini wrote on 2020-05-16, 16:21:

But I think the slow CPU might have been a bottleneck, unfortunately that is all I had.

It is for sure, difference is not huge but a bit bigger with a faster processor. Not that it mattered when the 3000 and the 3500 were sold new, most people would have noticed zero performance increase and a tv tuner

@doornkat
🤣, that is a great way to mess with people 😁

@imi
Yeah, I guess a pentium 3 1000mhz (or faster) would've been more suitable. I do have a V3 3000, custom modded with faster 5.5ns ram, with a simple bios flash it could overclock to 183mhz and it would run fine. But the card is too special for me, original black heatsink and the polymer caps on the right, which if one is not careful when removing the card, have been replaced with smd caps, it is a beauty to see and so, I'm afraid to try overclocking it. 😀

This felt like the right place to post about yet another odd Voodoo 3 3500 I've just come across. I had a 3500 in my "to be tested" box and just pulled it out to take a look at it. When I looked at the SDRAM chips I was surprised to see they were 6ns chips! Sure enough, 3dfx Tools shows the card is clocked at 166Mhz, rather than the standard 183Mhz of most other 3500 models. Otherwise, it looks identical to any other 3500.

This seems to be one of the oddball 166Mhz 3500 cards mentioned here about half way down the page. Has anyone ever come across one of these or heard anything about them, aside from this anecdote on that page?

I have not heard a mention, press release or rumor of this board and over 70 of them pop up on Ebay 5 years after 3dfx closes.

I can't seem to find any reference to these anywhere else online, in 3dfx collections or elsewhere. I'm assuming they were an attempt to sell a 3500 without having to source 183Mhz SDRAM... but I can't find any record of them being "sold".

EDIT: Found one person here that says they found one of these 12 years ago.
https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/forums/d … -the-old-days-/

Tangentially related to this topic - a lot of people aren't aware that you can get a stock standard voodoo 3500 to work just fine with a VGA monitor without the octopus. The compaq voodoo 3500 cards are a kind of halo retro enthusiast product which drives up the price - a bit unnecessarily.

All you need is a cheap P&D to VGA connector and a pair of wire cutters. The pinout is the same on these adapter, it is just usually the bit of metal shielding around the pings that hugs the port isn't the right size. Make a cut in the bit of metal so that it gives a little or take it off and there you go. It also has the advantage of being really clean output compared to the octopus.

mothergoose729 wrote on 2021-01-19, 19:58:

Tangentially related to this topic - a lot of people aren't aware that you can get a stock standard voodoo 3500 to work just fine with a VGA monitor without the octopus. The compaq voodoo 3500 cards are a kind of halo retro enthusiast product which drives up the price - a bit unnecessarily.

All you need is a cheap P&D to VGA connector and a pair of wire cutters. The pinout is the same on these adapter, it is just usually the bit of metal shielding around the pings that hugs the port isn't the right size. Make a cut in the bit of metal so that it gives a little or take it off and there you go. It also has the advantage of being really clean output compared to the octopus.

I did this with a couple adapters. It's pretty fiddly and the results aren't always good.

There are some adapters out there that are natively wired correctly too, you just have to bend the metal connector a bit to fit. This makes a Voodoo 3 3500 a much more practical choice, and very fast for Glide games.

I think most of the value in these less common cards is simply in adding to a collection. With such a short (but fairly interesting) history, it wasn't too hard to get a fairly complete retail\oem 3dfx collection in years past, so finding the more "rare" cards became the interesting part. Having several really nice websites dedicated to 3dfx has helped this along. Sadly, all the gold scrapping done in recent years has made even the once-common cards quite hard to find, and the prices are high because there's also lot more demand from retro gamers and collectors that are late to the game.

Finding weird stuff is the main draw in this hobby, for me.