3dfx Voodoo Banshee Review 

"Here is the power supply, which was provided by the manufacturer for free, and by the way, don't buy it, buy something better instead" XD

I like the variety of the videos you put up, but I always get especially fired up when I see a video on Windows 95/98 era hardware.

Again... I saw P3 Slot Type, SD RAM, AGP Video Card, PCI And ISA in a Green Motherboard... Have my Like and Love!!!

Yes! More vintage reviews!

RIP 3DFX you were swallowed up by the GREEN machine.

I was rocking a 486 until 2002, I could only dream about this. 🙂

Thumbs up for Clive Barkers Undying benchmark.

256MB of SDR RAM was considered monstrous back in the days of the Banshee. Most systems of the time shipped with 64MB, some still with 32MB and 128MB was kinda high end. I don't really miss the days where we needed separate video cards for different functions, it just made everything too cluttered and made an already expensive PC even more so, especially if you add an MPEG 2 card.

I couldn't stop smiling. All of those games were like state of the art at the time, all the time tweaking and pushing our systems to get just a little bit more lol. Thank you so much for the memories. 👍👍🙂

That Clive Barker game running at 800x600 is pretty damn impressive considering the hardware.

First card I bought with my own money! Paired it with a p166mmx, didn't know any better, still had a blast!

Very nice review, as always! I had no Banshee card in 1998, because I was the owner of a Voodoo 2 12MB at this time, but a friend of mine had a Creative 3D Blaster Banshee PCI in his Pentium MMX 166 system. The Banshee is a nice card for a AMD K6-II/III, or a slower Pentium II.

voodoo banshee was my first 3d card.... a giant leap from a 4mb vga videocard :D

I had a Creative 3d Blaster voodoo banshee back in the day. Loved it! So many good memories... It was my first proper 3d accelerator. Before that I had a Diamond Stealth 2 s220.

Saw one of these locally for a decent price but never thought it was worth picking up. Now seeing the price they're going for here, and the performance actually being somewhat okay I wish I'd investigated it a bit more. Cheers for the great video on it.

I still remember going to the computer store to buy this accelerator card, I was buzzing about it, I bought a new game also to go with it, the Star Wars rogue squadron, very fond memories

This was my very first 3d card back in the day. and wow, did it ever kick some ass!

this GPU is just 25 days younger than me and it still works

Ah, Voodoo

Watching these brings me back to my unreal tournament days. So many good memories

When I watch such videos I feeĺ 20 years younger. And thanks for your clear English, I am practicing it following you.

You're the first creator i've seen cover some of the oddities that i actually had back in the day, this is awesome!

I actually upgraded a Voodoo 1 setup to a Banshee, back in the day. The quality loss from the passthrough cable was actually pretty serious, especially if your VGA didn't have a very high quality DAC, to the point where high resolution Windows was noticeably blurry. At some point I remember just swapping the cable from one card to another when I wanted to play a game.

Another excellent video!!! I never had a Banshee I had its much slower older brother the Voodoo Rush, in fact I still have it. I found it downstairs next to the Voodoo 3 3000 that replaced it back in the day.

I had a 3dfx Voodoo Banshee back when it was first released. It was paired with a AMD K6 200 mhz overclocked to 225 mhz (3x75 instead of 3x66.) I kept the card when I later upgraded to an Intel Celeron 300A OC'd to 464 mhz (4.5x103.) The card did not like games that used the Quake II or later game engines since they used multi-texturing heavily but other games like Need For Speed 2 & 3 ran beautifully on it! Plus as Phil mentioned the DOS gaming performance (along with Windows 2D) was outstanding on it! I later replaced the Banshee with a 3dfx Velocity 100 card (for really cheap) which itself was a cut down Voodoo 3 2000 card.

Got to love old pc hardware to see how far we came from 😊

3dfx will always remain special for me.

I used this back in the day. It was great for its time

Actually overall the Voodoo Banshee was just as fast as the Voodoo 2 or Tnt1, it was a lot cheaper than the Voodoo 2 and Tnt1, it had a better picture quality 22-bit then the Voodoo2 and Tnt1 and had much better compatibility than the Tnt1. In my opinion the Banshee was the best 1998 video card.

It always makes me smile when I see ram modules that are made in my hometown.

This brought back more memories. Thanks Phil! The first PC I built back when I was about 16-17 I had a Pentium II 266 MHz and a Diamond Fire GL 1000 pro. It was a decent card but Half-Life came out and it didn't support the game so I got a Banshee and Half Life went on to be my favorite game of all time. That and Counter-Strike because I was really good it. Those were the days. 10 GB hard drive was big! 20 G was HUGE. lol

Fantastic review, back in the days my banshee was Asus 16 mb, and as I remember it was very nice in all games and very compatible with glide dis games unlike v2, and I really remember very good memories with the card playing Shadowman, thanks for your review.

Thanks for giving the banshee some love. A creative 3d blaster banshee was my first decent 3d card and it was night and day.

Never had the pleasure of a banshee but rocked my Voodoo2 SLI with memory overclocked at 110mhz for a long time. Loved games in GLIDE, they looked so nice.

Yhea , I have waited for years in the channel to this review to came. It was at my setup as teenager and did save the world so many times from Aliens invaders, Demons and Powermongers. All thanks to my beloved Banshee and His sidekick,, the AMD K6-II

I know ide cables are necessary here. But man , I don't miss those!😄 Cool video Phil. Xx

Wohoo banshee, one of the famous card in my circle back in the day. Thank you this review bring back the memories, like you have to bring your own cpu just for LAN party and compare the video card or vga card in our terms.

This videocard was my first Voodoo Banshee card,too bad i got it 5 years ago,not when it was still relevant ☺

My first Videocard! Althought It was the Maxi gamer Phoenix Version by Guillemot.

oh I remember those times when graphics cards did not have fans and processors had chipset fan. Pretty different computer experience than today's i9 9900k setup XD

Ahh what nostalgia! I had a Banshee2 (I think) in my first computer in 2000.. But I ran a AMD K6-2@233mhz (??) then i believe. Cool to see the old hardware today, thing have changed a lot since then! My first HDD had less mb/gb than a gpu today.. Always fun to mod and upgrade hardware, this i how it began for me. Keep those good old nostalgic reviews and test up!

I went with the Voodoo 3 2000. It was what I needed at the time. I enjoyed it. That was on a Pentium II 350. My PIII 1 ghz had a Geforce 2 MX and my Athlon (Thunderbird) 1ghz had a GeForce 2 MX as well. 96-2000 was where gaming really started to heat up on PC. So much so I was finally OK with letting go of my old Amiga and Consoles and game on PCs as my primary source of fun. Great vid. Brought me right back.

Great video :) Idea for another one - punching above weight. 90's were a period of time when you basically had to update your rig each year to play new games. Try to get a P5 MMX CPU, overclock it up to 266/300, combine with 64 MB of RAM and Voodoo 2 or Banshee and try to run "newer" games. I played hell a lot of Q3 Arena on my P166@200 MMX/32 MB/Voodoo Rush. Of course with bots and on very low framerates :)

I ran 2x Voodoo2s and a Banshee as the 2D back in the day.

This was my first graphics card for my first build (my dad had some ATI Rage cards and Diamond Matrox cards too).

I had one of these when they were hot. What a great card it was back in the day.

As soon as I heard "3DFX Voodoo card" I clicked the "like" button!

First 3d GPU I ever owned. Loved that card...

I had this card. I loved this card back in the day over the early Nvidia and ATI cards.

Wow! The Banshee was the first accelerator I ever had. I had the one made by Creative Labs. Good memories.

Cyrix 686 233Mhz, 32MB RAM, Voodoo Banshee, and Yamaha OPL3-SA. This was my very first gaming rig I have built. I was so damn proud of it.

Had it. Loved it. My first 3d card. Fond memories of HL and TFC on it. PCI.

800x600 still feels high-res to me lol.

Yes, finally again full "retro" stuff. Slot 1 is or rather was my first solo build, as a 13 year old :)

One of the best things about Unreal is that, with patch 2.26, it supported all major 3D graphics APIs of the time : Glide (since release), OpenGL and Direct3D. It also included a software renderer. I remember tinkering with my Celeron 300A@450, my RivaTnT 16 Mb and the Detonator drivers a LOT so as to make stuff like the castle flyby (intro) and the rocket escape (outro) as fluid as possible. I had a few 3dfx cards, but I must admit that as fast as they were, the comfort brought by 24-/32-bit color as opposed to the dithering found on 16-bit cards like the Voodoo really did help. So did a 32-bit Z-buffer, with all the depht artifacts you'd get on a Voodoo compared with the crisp intersecting polygons of other cards.

+1 for MatroxG400's.... I love those cards.

My experience of the banshee and voodoo series in general back in the day : Drool worthy cards that I could not hope to buy in a thousand years. :p Every magazine spoke about them and all I had was a 233mmx with a s3 virge

I have two Ensoniq Banshees...the SGRAM variant. Recently testing these in a build that I normally have a V5 5500 in and I am extremely impressed. While it is no V5, these cards (at least the SGRAM version) really hold their own. They ran everything I threw at them from the time period, and really looked and performed great. The 2D on these cards is even better than the V5 IMHO. All around fantastic card that I would be proud to have in a vintage Win 98 3DFX rig.

Banshee was a really popular card when it came out. The value was amazing.

Phil how about a video Banshee vs Tnt1 vs Voodoo 2 ? Those were the best cards from 1998 and the performance was very similar. Back in 1998 everyone wanted to know which one is the best overall. My personal opinion is that the Benshee was the best card from 1998, similar performance to the Tnt1 but much better conpatibility plus the 22-bit picture, similar in performance to the Voodoo 2 but much better 22-bit picture plus higher resolution than the 800x600 for the Voodoo 2.

I had a 3DFX Voodoo Banshee also had a Power VR2 around the same time.. followed by a Riva TNT, GeForce 2 MX200 then GeForce 2 GTS.. Great era of PC Gaming.

I remember when the Banshee released. I thought it looked like a good card, but I still wanted a Voodoo2 instead, which I bought for my system. Then I later upgraded to Voodoo 2 SLI, very nice performance! I think I had a Diamond Monster 3D-2 and a Creative 3D Blaster Voodoo2, both 12MB versions. I loved those cards.

My first 3d accelerator was a Banshee. I bought it with birthday money when I was 13. It turned the family PC with it's Pentium 233 MMX into a gamer. This combination did a good job with Jedi Knight, Motoracer, NFS 3, Half-life, Wing Commander Prophecy, Freespace, NBA Live 99, Unreal, etc....

Never actually saw a Banshee in the wild back then, I remember people always said it wasn't that great and everyone I knew just went for the 12MB Voodoo2 (or two of them). Good to finally see a real world review :)

So this is actually good! I thought like "It's a budget Voodoo card, not worth having". But now that I know it doesn't need a 2d card to work perfectly it's a great card for motherboards that don't have many PCI slots.

I loved my Banshee when I got it. It was the beginning of my GPU journey. From there I went to a VooDoo 3, and then another VooDoo 3 with an S-video out, which I played on my 27" Sony Trinitron. Those were the days. If you're looking for a motherboard, don't count out the slot Athlon CPU's. They can be overclocked, if you don't mind SMD soldering. Got my 600Mhz to 750Mhz, which was a monster price difference at the time.

Awesome video! I enjoy playing around with vintage Windows 9x era hardware and its fun to see these items brought back to life and shared with others via your channel. BTW, for those of us who built our early IT careers on Novell Netware, its especially cool to see a 'Novell Yes' logo on the motherboard! :)

I had one back in the day. Worked fine.

The voodoo banshee was a pretty meh card, but it was a step in the right direction instead of having to rely on a second card for 2D. The one thing I love about the unreal games in the era with the a 3Dfx card is the extra detail you see when you get close to objects (like walls boxes and such) that wasn't there for any other renderer

Brings back memory. I used the voodoo cards for a while. I think I had a Tsing 2d card at that time that was very fast with windows. Had a Sound Blaster audio card and was using AMD cpus also. One game I really liked that worked really well with the 3DFX cards was Indipendance War. A pretty good space game. As I remember you actually needed the 3DFX cards to play that game. Later they came out with I-War2 EOC which is still a really good space game even to today. That game would run on anything pretty much. But those were fun days at the early times of computers. A lot more places to buy stuff and you had to really know the computers back then. IRQ's were fun to assign if you wanted stuff to work. What a pain that was plus memory managers config. sys files and autoexec.bat files to make... Aw, what a time...

There is a reason why Voodoo Banshe was what it was. 3DFX wanted to expand to both OEM Market and low-end customers, where expensive add-on cards are not exactly desirable option. Voodoo Banshe was relatively cheap stand-alone video card with excellent 2D and video performance - so it was exactly what they wanted at a time. It was also easy to update in case they need another filler product (they did - Voodoo 3 was basically Voodoo Banshee with higher clock speed and additional texturing unit).

I loved that card , i ran Return Fire 2 game using this card., i had this card a long time. Awsome Card

Interesting Video. I had a Banshee back in 1998 with a Pentium 200 MMX. Now back then the Banshee made a massive difference in graphics over software, making games like Quake, Half Life and others very playable. One cool thing back then was some games played better on the Banshee with the higher clock as many games did not use the second texture unit that the Voodoo 2 could use. Maybe you can do a follow up video on what many back then would have use the Banshee on, a Pentium 200 or 233 MMX, and show the massive difference between software rendering and the might of the Banshee.

Every time when I’m talking about Win 95/98 video card mining Riva 128 or TNT, Voodoo 1 or 2, many retro hardware fans telling me that Banshee is the card to go with. But in my case it is TNT1 for 2d/d3d & opengl, and Voodoo 2 just for few Glide games only, like Tomb Raider 1, Need for Speed 2 se, Carmageddon. Any way Banshee it is 3Dfx first complete solution, and it great card. Thanks

Thief 1 and 2. Especially the last! Ooooh yeah!

Loved the ZFG "Review" of the PSU!

Me: Clicks on video... Hits pause... Hits like... Hits play... Thank you Phil!

On my gosh! Expendable! I had forgotten. What a great game that was. Used to play that on a Number Nine Revolution card--I think I still have it.

You can show realtime FPS in any GoldSrc game (such as Half Life) by opening the console (default: tilde key) and typing in "cl_showfps 1" - An alternate method is typing in "net_graph 1" instead

As soneone thats newer to owning a pc, learning about old gpus is so crazy. i didnt even know as a kid pc gaming was a thing aside from childrens cd based games haha. very cool!

3rd card I ever bought, my first two where VideoLogic Apocalypse 3D PowerVR & VideoLogic Apocalypse 3Dx PowerVR. I loved my P166mmx machine, I overclocked it to 200Mhz!!

Another good game to test in this era of PC would be System Shock 2. It supports higher resolutions, uses DX6.

I remember buying a creative banshee 16 MB PCI for my Packard Bell desktop running 133mhz Pentium think I had 16mb edoram and like a gig of hard drive, blew my mind how much games like Moto racer and need for speed looked on that card but it sucked that it didnt do anything for Final Fantasy7 which i think was compatable with an actual voodoo card. In all I wish I still had that system so my 3 year old little boy could experience all the fun times us older people had with these machines, on the bright side I do have 5 or 6 boards slot1, supersocket7, socket 370 and a amd socket A along with ram old hard drives and other misc parts and all my old software that im planing to build with him I think he will love it.

I wish i still had mine. I never thought to keep my old computer stuff

I got my Banshee around its release date in PCI flavor for my P233 rig, It played anything I threw at it! I only upgraded in early 2000 because I came across a new Boxless OEM Voodoo 3 3000 for $35 when the computer fair was in town.

My first experience with a Vodoo card was a Banshee and it was way better than my Matrox Mystice G200 it replaced. :)

Road rash, motocross madness, monster truck madness 2, duke3d, need for speed, gta, unreal and tournament, quake 2, soldier of fortune, half-life, are win98 classics for me

I have the same CPU, GPU and sound card about to go into a system. nice timing! and great EP too!

I had a Banshee from Creative paired with an 400MHz AMD K6-2. Good old Days :)

I really loved playing clive barkers undying, never finished it or undying 2 either. Thank you for a great vid I'm going back in :)

Thanks for this awesome video. I have both Voodoo Rush and Banshee, but I wish I had a Voodoo 3 for retro gaming. Can you please write in the video description the list of games tested? How well would Banshee work in a Slot A mobo with Athlon 550MHz cpu?

if anyone is curious the voodoo banshee is a voodoo 2 without having a secondary 2d card and is actually a little slower

great as allways!!! thank you!

You should look for Free space 2, pretty game and massive spaceships. Worked great on my Voodoo 3

Great video, and also congrats on being featured in Linus' latest video. :) Cheers!

What would be the Ultimate Beach house Vacation or as you lot say it Holiday take with you to a house gaming all night MS-Dos or Windows 9X computer. Either a built in screen or portable screen. That would be a cool thing to try out.

Would be interested to see a comparison between the Banshee and the older Voodoo Rush based cards.

Voodoo Banshee was my first "GPU." I think Falcon 4.0 and Rogue Squadron were the first games I used with 3D acceleration. Going from software to hardware 3D was a revolution.

Good video... and am I the only one wondering what the trace layout people were smoking putting the FDD socket there?

I had forgot about Undying by my favorite Author....ill have to check out GOG for it..Glad you included it..and nice shot at the PSU company...made me laugh for the first time today