Hey all, thanks for checking out my look back at the Voodoo 5 5500. It's been brought to my attention that I goofed! The Voodoo 4 4500 was actually released a few months after the Voodoo 5. The more you know! If you enjoyed this video, make sure to check out my "Gaming on the Asus EeePC Netbook" video here : ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-o_Z6vu8XkJo.html See you in a couple weeks with another Retrospective!
Still got my old V5 PCI from back in the day, I've got it installed in a modern righ, Ryzen 3200G and Proxmox. VM with direct hardware passthrough of the V5 and Creative Audigy (each on their own pcie>pci bridge) really removes all the limits and bottlenecks.
The athlon xp used a performance rating system. For example 1700+ meant it was running as fast or even faster than a hypothetical original athlon at 1700mhz.
It's a really nice build and I know I'm late to the party but, I want to express my concern for the choice of power supply, as I saw no one in the comments mention it at all. With Socket A/462, you have to make sure your PSU supports a high load on the 5V rail, because these CPUs draw most of their power through the 5V rail. It's pretty specific to that generation of Athlons since 486/early Pentium era. Most PSUs back in the days could support load of 250-300W (and even more) on the 5V rail, while most newer PSUs usually top at 120-ish watts. Other than that, that's a really neat retro rig 👌 Great video ! :)
I'll send this in an email to you if you don't reply here. But it looks like Voodoo 5s are going for 500 to 1000 dollars theses days! Is the floppy original?
My first 3D card was a matrox mystique 220. I had a cyrix m2-200 or 233 back then, and since the matrox didn't have triangle setup in hardware, that had to be done by the CPU. But the Cyrix was so fast that my benchmark results were much better than with any voodoo 1. Later I got an Intel 740, with bilinear filtering without performance loss, and even AA and alpha blending. Those were the good times, with Star Wars - Shadows of the Empire and Mechwarrior 2 Mercenaries.
You're lucky to have Voodoo5 - that stuff is insanely expensive nowadays (even for retro computers standards). In place where I live it costs over 9000 CAD.
That's nuts. I got one in a huge lot of retro hardware last year. The whole lot included several late 2D and early 3D cards, including the Voodoo 5, a Voodoo 2, a 2U server with 4 dual core P4 Xeons and a pair of Sun workstations for just $100! There were some other goodies like Sun expansion cards and keyboards, about a dozen SAS drives for the server and countless other pieces of vintage hardware including network adapters, RAM, PCMCIA cards, a vintage CF to IDE adapter and a complete 2x2 core Sempron AGP workstation board. I also got a rare Sapphire HD3850 AGP 1GB for $5 last year. You must hate me. 🤣🤣 Probably more if you knew just how much stuff I get for free. But seriously, the voodoo 5 is not worth 9 grand. Sealed in box it might be worth $2500 US (3090Ti can suck it!). A nice working example is worth about $450 US.
Yep - putting fingers and other surfaces all over the edge connectors eventually leads to bad connections or worse on at least one component. Anti static bags are always worth keeping, and not ever touching the edge connectors or other components, or having them sat on random surfaces is generally a good idea with this kit. Nice build. I'd moved onto an ATi Rage Fury 128 after a Voodoo2 12MB by the time the Voodoo 3-5 rolled around. DVD was taking off, and the ATi cards were fantastic with video, as well as having S-Video output for the big TV as well as the monitor. Good times.
Oh how I wanted one of these back when it was released. I'd had a Voodoo 1, Voodoo 2 and Voodoo 3 as well as the Voodoo Banshee, but never had a version 4 or 5 board. It's hard to believe that 3DFX, so long the absolute rulers of the 3D GPU market, could fall from grace so quickly and catastrophically. Only to be bought out by your greatest rival, Nvidia, for peanuts.
While Glide was ahead of its time, the insistence of using a proprietary API is what doomed them to failure. Even from one generation to the next, there was never full backwards compatibility because they did not think it was relevant. There were very few games with native Glide support. I lusted after the Voodoo for like 18 months and then got a RIVA TNT, the smart choice. ATI was smart and dropped their proprietary API PDQ. Essentially, 3dfx pulled a Betamax🤦♂🤦♂ When nvidia bought 3dfx, they flat out refused to support the mess that was Voodoo and rightfully so. They got away with it because it would be corporate suicide to keep doing the same thing that ran their new acquisition into the ground.
@@Lurch-Bot1 The founders claim is was almost exclusively the decision to make their own cards. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-3MghYhf-GhU.html
Pretty neat... I just paired up a Voodoo5 5500 with a similar system that has the same mobo. It's had winxp installed for years so I'm currently running some mod drivers. 3dmark was only 2430 or so with an athlon 2400+. I'll probably buy one of those sd card adapters and drop my ram down to 128mb and install win98. Good to know what score I should be shooting for.
I have a similar build only with two athlon MP server cpus running at 2 GHZ each and 3 GB of DDR. Because of SMP, i run win2000 dual boots with XP. I already have a 98 voodoo 2 SLI machine so no 98 on this rig. Also I'm using two SSD drives. One for each OS. OH and a creative labs audigy card. Its a beast of a rig and i love it
I have a Voodoo 5 5500 AGP and V 3 2000. I tried to set up the V5, but my MSI AMD mobo is busted. Can I install this card on a PCI slot using a AGP to PCI interface and not worry about the chipset not supporting 3.3 volts? Coz the Voodoo cards needs chipsets that support 3.3 volts on AGP. Anything lesser would burn the card form what I read.
I don't have a perfect answer for you. I would guess it depends on if the PCI to AGP adapter provides 3.3v or not. But I did find an old forum post that suggests someone has done this already. Hope it helps www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=63903
@@PNPRetro this was importany. Im trying to see the different performance results from youtubers. I had this card a few years ago. Ran fine except when benchmarking unreal 98 after the update...it gave me a 34 fps rating from a pentium iii machine 1gb ram. Wasnt sure what was the issue and had quit testing it. Appreciate the vid though
Two things: 1. Any retro tech channel that owns a Voodoo5 gets instant cred. 2. I always thought the Voodoo5 cards looked like something 3dfx threw together out of whatever they could find to try to compete. They just look so... rough. You know? Anyhow, nice channel you have!
Well thank you! I've seen a few of your shorts! Small world! And I do agree. And the pictures of the larger cards that were going to require external power seemed even more cobbled together. I also get a kick out of the tiny heatsinks and fans. Thanks for checking out the video!
This card is the core of my DOS gaming rig. Glad I got it, when I had the chance. I could run faster GeForce cards, but for native Glide, 3DFX is a must. Plus AGP! It's great.
@@PNPRetro I put my chips on Matrox back in the day. Another brand that went nowhere. I only discovered Voodoo's when I started retro-collecting. Got nearly every model, with the exception of 4500. And lots of them came in bags of parts, and cost me next to nothing. 5500 I had to ebay back when prices were tolerable, because I used to love games that had Glide support (like Wing Commander), which had the checkbox disabled. I was eager to re-experience them all with 3DFX, and was absolutely glad. I'd even consider getting the overpriced 6000 remake, but so far, I've only seen cosmetic reviews. No working demos. When I saw the SLI-like port on 5500 I wondered if that was from the PCI version, to allow dual cards, but turned out it was for an expansion card, and had nothing to do with SLI. After Matrox I went with Nvidia. Admitted defeat. By the time I got into 3DFX, the company was long gone.
This card really isn't great for playing DOS glide games because it is not really compatible. You have to tweak just to get Glide 1 to run on a Voodoo 2. You presumably downloaded some modern driver or converter and possibly altered config files without realizing the implication. When the Voodoo 5 was released, you could not run DOS Glide games on it. And while Voodoo 2 can be made to run Voodoo 1 games properly, if you are running those first or second gen games on your Voodoo 5, you aren't getting it how it was originally supposed to be. It is a different architecture. You are technically emulating the function, which isn't any more correct than simply running it on a modern PC in emulation. I also suspect it isn't great at running regular DOS games either. Where the Voodoo 5 belongs is in a Win 98 rig alongside a 600MHz PIII.
@@enilenis The Millennium was a good 2D accelerator. I used one from 1994-1999 or so, being relegated to secondary status in 1998 when I got a RIVA TNT. I also used a Diamond Stealth 64 VRAM in a second PC during that time, until replacing it with the slightly better Matrox card. The Voodoo 5 5500 is a SLI card, just has both GPUs on one board. Stood for Scanline interleaving back then and was conceptually the same as the later Scaleable Link Interface while being functionally different. This is where nVidia got the SLI name in the first place. The Voodoo 2 was the first SLI graphics card in history and the Voodoo 5 the first dual GPU card. A lot of people think it is the HD 3870 X2 which came some 7 years later. The 3870 x2 was merely the last AGP card to feature dual GPUs. I know, I know, it was only ever released as a PCIe variant but it is PCIe via a bridge chip and was natively AGP so it counts. If you wanted to, you could make a custom board, transfer the components and make it run in an AGP slot. You would have to write a custom driver to get it working though, which would be the hard part. In practice, however, nobody is going to do that because you would be ruining a very rare and valuable GPU. The best I could do was add an HD3850 AGP to my collection, which is fine because it is the most powerful AGP gpu that actually ran in an AGP slot since the single die 3870 AGP was never released. I managed to get the Sapphire variant in pristine condition for just $5 a few months ago 🤤🤤 As for the x2, it really wasn't worth the price which is why they are so rare. In benchmark testing it scored 930 to the 3850s 787 due to the fact converting an AGP card to PCIe incurred huge performance penalties. They didn't release the single 3870 in AGP most likely because it outperformed the much more expensive X2 and they would have not sold a single X2. This is why, for the AGP era, it is always better to stick with AGP because there were no native PCIe cards. Everybody thought AGP was going to win the war but then there were some big changes to both PCIe and GPU architecture in general. Though initially introduced on the HD 2000 series, the HD 3000 series uses the same Terascale 1 architecture and they are collectively the first modern GPUs due to the introduction of unified shaders.
@@Lurch-Bot1 Tweaking launches to get Glide working - well, that's kind of a given. Yes. I'd go with older PCI versions for DOS gaming for sure. I have older cards for that. My brother did have 1st Gen Millennium - the same one you had, and that convinced me to go with the brand, because that was the only accelerator I've seen to that point. Riva TNT 2 was when things turned, leaving Nvidia competition in the dust. I switched over during GeForce 3 era, and been using Nvidia cards ever since. Have a stack of ATI's of all generations from 1998 onward, but I've never turned any of them on even once. They always had shader problems in the past. Was never a fan. I've picked up a good share of $5 at thrift stores, often packed in plastic bags with other cards. I'd sometimes find multiple Voodoo's in a single bag. But those days are gone. The inexhaustible stream of retro hardware has come to an end. To build a proper retro PC now costs as much as a new one, if going with ebay parts. I have a lifetime supply of equipment, but it just goes bad over time, all by itself, and it's not always the caps. GeForce 3 I had I repurchased. Of Marvel cards, my original Mystique also went dead. The GPU started giving errors. Again, I bough the exact same model, because I don't want to lose anything from my past. Most of my retro stuff is from the AGP era. Different slot adapters, 2x, 4x even. Those weird "future-proof" agp slots with extra pins that never got used for anything... or AGP from Mac's of the era, that look more like PCI-E cards. I have one ATI card taken from a G5, I think. It's ATI, but I don't think it's designed to go into anything other than a Mac. These days I use emulation more often than original hardware, just for convenience. As Voodoo 5500 ages, I'm getting more afraid of wearing it out. Sticking with DOSbox and VM emulation of older OS, when needed. I have DOSbox installed on everything in the house that can run it, and most games I play from the past don't require 3D acceleration at all. Voodoo is just fora handful of select games.
I have a P3 Tualatin rig with a Voodoo 5 and I've run NFS III in Glide mode without issue. I remember thinking I've never seen it look this great before (running in 4x FSAA mode.) I remember either editing the text file in the game's installed /3dsetup folder so that it categorized the Voodoo 5 like a Voodoo 2... or maybe I made the change directly in the registry, not 100% certain. I MIGHT have also swapped out one file in the game's root folder - voodoo2a.dll IIRC. I remember experimenting with a version slightly newer than the one that shipped with my copy of the game. Is that the part you're coming up missing on? If you still need the solution, I'll fire up my Tualatin rig and see what I did. It's just been a while, nearly two years now, and I found I'm fonder of my Voodoo2 SLI system so that's the one I've had continuously hooked up for daily use.
Thanks so much for taking the time to reply! I hate to say it, but I'm going to have to revisit and figure out what I got stuck on. My memory isn't always the greatest. I know I had found a lot of forum posts about people asking how to get it working, and there were links to support files from EA that were no longer available, as well as some packages people had put together, which were also no longer there.
I have one of these in my collection but I have not used it yet. Pretty interesting addition to any vintage graphics card collection as the first dual GPU (on one card) and the final 3dfx release. The other cool thing is this used "SLI" on one board long before anyone else did (HD 3870 X2, eat your heart out!). But this SLI is Scanline Interleaving, which is functionally different if conceptually the same as when nVidia reimagined it as Scaleable Link Interface. I have plenty of PIII parts. I can use anything from an underclocked 200MHz through 1400MHz because I have upwards of 10 CPUs. Thinking 1700MHz is overkill. I'll probably go with 600 or 750 because this is less than half as powerful as the GF3 Ti 500 I bought in 2001 and ran with a Willamette P4. Sadly, while this technically supports Glide, it isn't really compatible with the games designed to work with the 1st and 2nd gen Voodoo. Good thing I have a Voodoo 2 in my collection to play around with those. Even still, it requires some special configuration to work with Gen 1 games. I think when you know all that about the Voodoo series, it is easy to see why 3dfx failed as a company. Even nvidia refused to support that mess when they acquired 3dfx.
@@PNPRetro im only 16 years old but im interessted in old hardware. For example the Case is from my grandpa, the Voodoo from my Uncle and the Gigabyte Motherboard with DDR Support from eBay. I Tried alot of Boards to Run win98 stable. I have a modern pc but also the retro PC with a nice CRT, i dont Use it that often at the Moment But i Played unreal, ut, half Life and some other Classics
Unfortunately that board is too new. It couldn't take the agp version and, while you could use a PCI one, you'd likely not be able to run an os that supports both the board and gpu well.
Operating system can definitely be your preference, although there are many pre-xp games that run better on Windows 98 versus XP. For the screen, games scale better on a CRT than an LCD if you are unable to run the games at the LCDs native resolution. And this project was never about modernizing the experience. Just building something clean that would show off the internals, and use a new power supply that was less risky than trying to use a 20+ year old one. But everyone is free to do their builds as they see fit. Just the way I decided to go with it :)
@@PNPRetro Also why did you not go with a AMD phenom system? It has multicore and a 64 bit cpu. i have a phenom x2 64 bit, which i would like to fit my v5, maybe using a AGP to pci adapter, but just scared with the voltage issues.
the AMD Athlon XP naming "officaly" had nothing to with intel and only equivalent clock of AMD Athlon CPU. but yeah really it was because the AMD Athlon XP's had better IPC but lower clocks then the P4 at the time so yeah a 3200+ is ~= to P4 at 3.2Ghz. that said the Athlon XP is much newer then the voodoo5. the voodoo5 came out the summer after the orginal Athlon CPU i ran my V5 in a Athlon 700mhz pc for a long time lol too long even ended up replacing it with a Raidon 9000 before finally upgrading everything when the Athlon 64 came out
It wasn't my first GPU, but it is the one that got me into Unreal Tournament in 2001. And yes, I've said goodbye to the Voodoo 5 5500 card, but not to 3DFX Glide, as I now use nGlide 1.05 program and 3DFX Glide API for my Editor copy of the game.
@@PNPRetro -- It's still my favorite PC game. Never fails to entertain & I keep local ngStats on my LAN server (including bot stats). 800,000+ frags and still counting (all players and bots combined).
Interesting video but I have just seen one thing: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-1IHMCcD2E2w.html Where did you get this screwdriver? Does it work with batteries?
I picked it up here! www.amazon.ca/gp/aw/d/B07H27G9NF?psc=1&ref=ppx_pop_mob_b_asin_title It's usb rechargeable. Not a lot of torque, but works pretty well and saves my wrists and forearms :)
all games were choppy as hell. i don't know if it's because of the voodoo5 card but for a system like that it's unbearable. any nvidia or ati of the era would destroy it.
hey this is really cool, nicely done, would it be okay if I share your video my my x-3dfx community at facebook? We always are looking for cool project s and yea this one is pretty neat, as the CPU gopes I would of gone for an AthlonXP 2000+_ to get the best optimal performance from a V5 5500, I myself use an AthlonXP 2200+ with an EPoX EP-8K7A+ with 2GB ram and WinXP pro + SP3 :) My main VGA is a Matrox Parhelia AGP 256MB DDR with a PC flashed 3dfx Voodoo5 5500 PCI Macintosh as the secondary card., for the V5 PCI mac I am building a Dual AMD AthlonMP 2800+ with a Gigabyte GA-7DPXDW-P so yea lots of fun incoming! the V5 PCI Mac will go in PCI64 slot 02 set to 32 bit with 66Mhz Bus mode that way it will perform like a 5500 AGP and have a DVI-D as cool optional extra :) But hey keep up the great work man, greets Willem B , owner of X-3dfx at FB :)
Thanks for watching! And feel free to share! I agree, I'd like to go faster on the CPU eventually. The machine feels pretty peppy as is... but it's always cool to max out the hardware as much as possible. Sounds like you have a pretty fun build! Always happy to hear about other people's rigs :)
