First post, by paradigital
- Rank
- Oldbie
So, I purchased a "for parts" Voodoo 5 5500 PCI from eBay around 3 weeks ago, it arrived today (well done eBay Global Shipping Program, good job). It was known to be missing at least one capacitor and have another knocked for six. After taking a good look around the card it was apparent that there were 3 missing cylindical caps (C41, C59, C85), as well as the two SMD caps near the Molex connector (C74, C89). There were also a couple of resistors "knocked" half off (one side still attached) around the aforementioned C85. There was also no cooling at all (no heatsinks or fans, I assume harvested for parts to fix another card).
So, replaced the missing components, and added some 40x40x16mm pure copper heatsinks, along with brand new 40mm fans. It boots, it installs drivers and it appears to run a-ok, however performance seems a bit... lacklustre.
I've never owned a Voodoo 5 5500 before so don't have a frame of reference for expected performance, but paired with my Abit BH6, 100fsb Slot-1 PIII 850 (running at 112*8.5, 952MHz), and running Windows 98 SE, I seem to be limited to bang on 70fps (give or take a few decimal points) when testing with Q3A 1.30's demo "four".
I'm running the Evolution Drivers for V4/5 (v1.00.09) from the FalconFly 3dfx archive.
Enabling or disabling single chip mode under antialiasing seems to make no difference to the performance, it's 70fps at 640x480x16 with both chips or a single chip, it's 70fps at 800x600x16 with either both or a single chip., 1024x768x16 drops a bit to 61.4fps in single-chip mode and 69.2fps with both chips active. This suggests to me that both VSA-100 chips are working (temperature of both using the highly-accurate "finger on heatsink" or "finger on rear of chip" methods appear consistent with each other when in dual-chip mode), and that I'm CPU bound? Do I need to pair this card with a faster PC (I've got options, I just had this machine to hand as I'd been testing other video cards in it, like my newly acquired GeForce 256 DDR)? I've looked at period benchmarks for the V5 5500 (albeit AGP), and an Athlon 750 seems to beat my framerates by a noticable 5-10%.
Anything I should try?