Can't comment on if it's wise or not, but it's popular for a variety of reasons, the best I can think of are the general popularity/notoriety associated with 3dfx, and to support Glide.

For anything (modern) DirectX, and ostensibly for OpenGL as well, I would assume the Ti 4200 would be a better choice - especially if you have a high resolution monitor.

because a V2 SLI setup will let you run (provided you have a fast enough CPU of course , I would say 500-600Mhz PIII ) just about every game that supports Glide well , from Tomb Raider to Deus Ex.

a V2 SLI is about as capable as a Voodoo3 , but because the V3 is a full video card as opposed to an accelerator , its more logical to use a V2 SLI as an accelerator for glide games, along with a newer card, such as a Geforce, for D3D or some OpenGL games, as well as 2D of course (although using the passthrough cable will reduce the quality of the 2D picture somewhat, in addition to some early GF cards having a mediocre 2D picture)

I personally use a PCI V3 3000 along with a Geforce2 Ti , it works well , but if I want to play a Glide game, I have to restart the computer and change a video setting in the bios to switch the primary display to PCI , it works but I can see alot of people getting annoyed with this.

Some points are stated before, but let me make a bullet list:

• Best compromise between compatibility and performance
• Plays any Glide games well on a quick CPU
• Lets you use a faster card as main accelerator for D3D and OpenGL
• The coolness factor

Exactly!

I'm running an AGP TNT2 Ultra along with 2 x 12MB Voodoo 2 cards in SLI. These sit in my SS7 AMD K6 III+ 400Mhz Windows 98SE box which can run these games, and also boot to Windows 98 MS-DOS for those games that refuse to run well (or at all) through Windows. Having two of these 12MB cards lets me run certain Glide games at 1024x768 because of the extra framebuffer. For the D3D games I can use the AGP TNT2 Ultra. Just fired up Unreal Gold last night in GLIDE mode and I forgot how great that game looked (and looks!) with two of these cards running at 1024x768.

one thing to note however is that the V3 does have the advantage of a higher max resolution , the V2 SLI is limited to 1024X768 , while the V3 has a higher limit (Ive managed to run it at 1920X1080 , though due to a lack of support for widescreen ,the screen wasn't full).

now the question is whether you want to play any games at higher resolutions, and some games like Quake 2 are perfectly playable at 1600X1200 on a V3 3000 (I didn't measure the frame rate, but it seemed in the region of 30).