RARE Find: Quad-GPU Voodoo5!!!

[DSparil]

Speaking of a pretty rare find, I was in a local thrift store today and spotted a Voodoo3 PCI! $4.95 with the original box and everything lol... classic

[dudecat64]

Weird part is i have alot of old pci cards that have 16mb/8mb video ram. Can't remember the names of the cards though.

[ViperXtreme]

well, i still have my Sis 6215 2MB card, with expandable memory 0_o, S3 Trio 3D/2X 8MB still works and...

some Matrox G200 4MB, nVidia Riva TNT2 32MB and a fanless Radeon 9200 128MB >_>

[SaberJ2X]

I'm awaiting 2 more Voodoo 3s... got 2 PCI 2000s and 2 AGPs 3000s

gonna OC them all and only keep the highest one, the rest to storage or other retro comp

[austin865]

Originally Posted by The Kyle

I miss 3dfx .

this

[AceTK]

Ah I kinda miss my voodoo 5500, had a voodoo2 12mb before that. Getting a voodoo card literally spanked compared to what was around at the time. Nowadays it feels a bit crap in terms of what the next card does. Even the dx11 cards added a few features but wernt mindblowingly different. I remember the first time I ran stuff in glide mode and saw how silky smooth it was and better than the direct3d crap. Ah well, we can only hope that in the future someone steps up with a raytracing card to do the same quantum leap over existing cards and makes mincemeat out of nvidia like they did to 3dfx. I was hoping that company would be caustic but ive heard that anther company bought them out and now has re-purposed them to make ****ty mobile gpu chips. So yeah they took a company with the vision "we are going to bring raytracing to the home user" and changed it to "we are going to make yet another mobile gpu to compete with all the other mobile gpu boringness"

[djk11]

Wow awesome. I remember my SLI Voodoo2s when SLI was something different lol

[AceTK]

Yep it used to be Scan Line Interleave now its Scalable Link Interface

[yelsewshane]

Ya it's old classic but face the facts folks it's not like a car it's not worth money. Computers are the worse investment ne1 can make plain and simple. If you just wish to load up those old glide games then download a glide emulator and run them at high resolution etc and faster/better than that card could ever do.

[Svein_Skogen]

I used to have two 12MB Voodoo2 in SLI, combined with my 3DLabs "Wildcat" agp-board "back in the stone age". Alas, both of these companies are no more. 3DFX collapsed first, and the (then) carrion nVidia took care of the carcass. 3DLabs ended up in S3's belly.

However, part of the 3DFX legacy still lives. It's the Voodoo2 SLI that made other manufacturers look at the "just add another" route, giving us nVidia SLI and ATI Crossfire.

3DLabs' legacy can be found in the Quadro and FireGL/Pro boards (in fact, FireGL used to be a 3DLabs trademark) professional-grade opengl boards.

Both of these companies were a pioneers in 3D. 3DFX made 3D graphics in games a reality, when our processors were more or less incapable of providing us with the oomph to do this in software. Both the Unreal engine, and the modified quake engine used for Halflife owes their success to 3DFX. 3DLabs made PCs running windows capable of running professional-grade 3D apps (like maya, 3dstudio, autocad, etc), something that until that point had only been doable on military-budget-priced SGI visualization-stations. 3DLabs also pioneered the multiple-monitor-on-single-gpu market, by pushing the tech into the Permedia2 low-priced processor, making multi-monitor-setups available not only on insanely-priced systems used for engineers, but also for "regular desktops". One of my employers used such a setup for their stock traders (I set it up for them), and the added "desktop realestate" gave them an edge.

I actually had a voodoo5 on preorder back in '99, but "the world changed" (I switched employer) and some other lucky employee got "my" board instead.

//Svein

[sovietdoc]

It doesn't make sense to buy this, when it can not play any modern game at all. The money would be better spent on a modern day quad gpu or crossfire system.

This is just like buying an old E Type or a Ferrari GTO. It will suck compared to cars of today, but it is worth the money as a collectors item.

[slckb0y]

have to say i miss graphic cards with expendable memory slot would be awesome on nowaday graphic cards.

[F1refly]

....yet no one talks about the Matrox Parhelia? i cry inside

[AceTK]

Yeah if you could add more memory with push in chips on modern cards it would be great slckb0y. I think the future is going to be a merger tho. Given time the amount of power you get with the onboard gpu on cpu die systems will be sufficient that even high end gamers will be satisfied.

Also when you read stuff like this

http://blogs.intel.com/research/2010...aborate_on.php

You gotta wonder what goodies are in store for us in the future and lets be fair things have only really got better.

[Mannerheim]

Originally Posted by F1refly

....yet no one talks about the Matrox Parhelia? i cry inside

It was slow and given nothing for gamer.

[Veteran]

A matrox millenium(2d card) combined with a voodoo 2 gave colours in some guys that i cant even get today with the high performance cards that we have,notably M1 Tank Platoon 2,it looked so much better on the hardware years ago than on the gpus i have now,obviously my performance is loads better now though.

[sovietdoc]

Voodoo with 4 GPUs? That's pornography.

[Mineria]

Still got my original voodoo 1 and 1 of the 12MB voodoo 2's I used in SLI.
Think I'm gonna get me one of them voodoo5 PCI cards so I can get some glide on my old games, cause they look crap with everything else.

[Firepac]

Originally Posted by Herbert0100

rofl what would that compare 2? a 6600gt or lower?

It's actually comparable to a Geforce 2.... a 6600gt will smoke that thing.