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The Geforce 3: why?

Agent Orange said:
Just did a quick search on some site for prices, UK. You're up on this more than anyone else here on the forum.
;w
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I like filling in the gaps of what I used back in the day and what I didn't have and collecting what should be at the lowest price on the value curve get pricey when they don't dip as low as they used to. Normally a 7 year old GPU should be basically worthless, but they are not. You also have the problem where these cards ran hot when new and cooked themselves to death, pieces literally fall off boards, capacitors go bad, voltage regulators fry, etc. and quite a bit that is still around is nonfunctional. The only deals around are the flood of rx580 era boards coming from mining operations and those are beat to death.
 
NeXT said:
Lets go full crazy. 🤪
I'd have to dig for the photo again but it popped up in my feeds last week that someone had completely bypassed emulating 3DFX silicon in an FPGA and opted to instead graft a chip onto a new card with a bridge and a PCI Express slot. No, this is not the guy who made a Voodoo5 work on a PCIe to AGP bridge board.
In fact, I've seen a LOT of repro 3DFX cards coming out lately that are using original 3DFX chips, so either they have access to a lot of unused tray chips or they are already actively stealing them from original boards rather than starting over from scratch.
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Those are being made from New Old Stock chips(of which there are apparently a sizeable number still available), but those won't last forever. I really want one of those "Voodoo6"s made from 4 voodoo 5 chips, but last I checked they weren't making them in AGP just yet. Also I can't possibly afford one right now. But mostly the AGP thing.
 
hunterjwizzard said:
Those are being made from New Old Stock chips(of which there are apparently a sizeable number still available), but those won't last forever. I really want one of those "Voodoo6"s made from 4 voodoo 5 chips, but last I checked they weren't making them in AGP just yet. Also I can't possibly afford one right now. But mostly the AGP thing.
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Voodoo5 6000. Uses four VSA-100 chips in SLI on an internal PCI bus on the card.

The card is not worth owning. The person that re-created the card copied the original card trace for trace, including all of the problems the original card had. Things like PCI bus corruption, unstable VSA-100 chips, AA/AF resulting in corrupted video output, etc.

Most of those problems stem from 3dfx laying out the PCI bus incorrectly on the card. Not enough ground returns were added, so the PCI bus is easily corrupted, and it gets worse the more the bus is saturated (eg. when AA/AF is enabled.) There is a workaround that skews the PCI clock just enough to make the bus more stable, but it doesn't always work.

Gamers Nexus did a piece on the card and showed all of the problems that you can encounter with the card.
 
The 6000 is an expensive conversation piece. My 5500 AGP has been in its box for a long time since the older 2 and 3 series are more useful or some Geforce is faster.
 
GiGaBiTe said:
Voodoo5 6000. Uses four VSA-100 chips in SLI on an internal PCI bus on the card.

The card is not worth owning. The person that re-created the card copied the original card trace for trace, including all of the problems the original card had. Things like PCI bus corruption, unstable VSA-100 chips, AA/AF resulting in corrupted video output, etc.

Most of those problems stem from 3dfx laying out the PCI bus incorrectly on the card. Not enough ground returns were added, so the PCI bus is easily corrupted, and it gets worse the more the bus is saturated (eg. when AA/AF is enabled.) There is a workaround that skews the PCI clock just enough to make the bus more stable, but it doesn't always work.

Gamers Nexus did a piece on the card and showed all of the problems that you can encounter with the card.
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Coincidently "as a conversation piece" is a big part of why I want one.

I'd also rather have a 5500 AGP, but also too expensive.

I'm aware that some geforce cards are "faster"(I have a 6800 and an ATI x1600), but for glide games nothing looks better than a genuine 3dfx.
 
hunterjwizzard said:
Coincidently "as a conversation piece" is a big part of why I want one.

I'd also rather have a 5500 AGP, but also too expensive.

I'm aware that some geforce cards are "faster"(I have a 6800 and an ATI x1600), but for glide games nothing looks better than a genuine 3dfx.
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This one?

A1.jpg
 
Eudimorphodon said:
Wait, there are Glide games that look good? ;)
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Unreal Tournament (the original 1999 version.)

With Glide, you get volumetric fog, detail textures, texture compression and a few other odds and ends. But you sacrifice texture quality unless you have a Voodoo4/5. The Voodoo2/3 have a 256x256 texture size limitation, and the Voodoo3 has a weird box filter that causes the screen to look soft.

Though, you can get most of the fancy effects in OpenGL and Direct3D if you open the hidden preferences menu via the console. Not sure about S3 MeTaL, never had a Savage4 video card.
 
I played UT on my Voodoo 5500 back then, a very fun game (two towers map).

It was kind of funny I went to BestBuy and seen the 5500 on the shelf for $299 or 279 and purchased it, went home and it didn't fit my case. So, I ended up buying a new case and figured why not get a new motherboard and CPU as well (p3-700 I think it was).

One of the reasons the 5500 is so expensive is that it was only months between the rollout and 3dfx going bankrupt so not that many were made and sold.
 
Eudimorphodon said:
Wait, there are Glide games that look good? ;)
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Lol well the original Unreal and Return to Nal Poli xpac, among others. I played through the entire game in software-mode back in the day, playing it again now on my voodoo 3 is like a whole new game! There's also Rune and a few others. I'm sure not every single glide game looks amazing, but you really cannot get the same effect without it.

Unknown_K said:
Which model? There are the 1000, 2000, 3000, and 3500 models. I think I had the 2000 model back in the day but snagged the others on ebay when they were cheap.
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3000. Best combination of price & capability when I was shopping, which sadly is when they were going for 150-200.
 
I did most of my 3dfx shopping in the 2000's on eBay. I just found a receipt for my Voodoo 3 3500 (came with card, cable, and the driver CDs) for a whole $6.75 shipped in 2007 (nobody else bid on it).

Too bad I wasn't a hoarder back then and just wanted 1 of each model I was interested in.
 
Unknown_K said:
I did most of my 3dfx shopping in the 2000's on eBay. I just found a receipt for my Voodoo 3 3500 (came with card, cable, and the driver CDs) for a whole $6.75 shipped in 2007 (nobody else bid on it).

Too bad I wasn't a hoarder back then and just wanted 1 of each model I was interested in.
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You'd be rich now.
 
I miss the 2000s ebay prices. All kinds of "rare" stuff was $10-$20 back then, now goes for $300+
 
For the most part I kept all the parts from my computer rigs (reused the cases for a few builds) after the Pentium came out (not worth the effort to sell and I liked to have a backup machine). So, I just stuck the parts in bins and forgot about them until I got into retro computing back in 2001 or so. I started with 68K macs and then Amiga/Commodore then old PC's. While I did make out pretty good on the hardware, I am glad I snagged the boxed software when I had the chance, it just doesn't exist anymore outside of games and some common OS's.
 
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