Do you do voodoo? (3dfx Voodoo5 5500)

Member Name: richard_richard

Product:	3dfx Voodoo5 5500
Date:	06/05/04 (300 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Good performance, Reasonable price

Disadvantages: Won't run latest games

The Voodoo 5500 is a high powered graphics card designed for use in personal computers.

I have owned this card for about a 2 years, and have found it to have made a very decent improvement to the speed and resolution levels on my computer. At the moment I am running it on an old 450Mhz machine and am about to swap the card over to a newer 2.4Ghz PC, so I?m hoping that I should see improved performance levels on this computer too.

I bought the card for £99 from a local computer supplier and understand that this was a pretty good price to pay as it had originally been selling for closer to £200!

This card is no longer manufactured as I believe that 3dfx Interactive, the company who made the card, have stopped making the Voodoo range of graphics cards.


Specs
The primary aim of this card is to run 3D graphics at a very high frame rate and 2D graphics at very high resolutions. As most computer games use 3D graphics these days it is obvious that this card has been designed with the games player in mind.

This is 128 bit card with an onboard memory of 64mb. It uses dual VSA-100 chips and has a standard clock speed of 166Mhz. With the use of a clever piece of software called ?overclock?, this speed can be increased to around 180Mhz. However the more the card is overclocked, the more likely it is to crash and cause your computer to lock up. Overclocking can also cause damage to the card as it causes it to run at a higher temperature and so can ruin the chips if it gets too hot! So as you can see, this feature needs to be used in moderation.

This card can also run very high 2D resolutions, up to 2048 x 1536 . Having such a high resolution levels means that this card could also find use with people who use complex 2D graphics design software, or photo editing software.

Two large fans are located on the card in order to keep it as cool as possible. It is also worth pointing out that this card is huge! It
only just fits into a standard computer box, so if you have a very compact computer you might not be able to fit this card in the PC!

This is the PCI version of the card, so it fits inside the computer and plugs into the standard PCI slot on the motherboard. It requires a power supply from the computer to run the fans, but most computers should have a spare power supply available inside, so connecting the card up shouldn?t cause too many problems.

This card features added T&L and FSAA graphics effects, which allow the computer to generate more convincing depth, lighting and motion blur effects, to give further realism to 3D graphics.


In Use
With the card plugged into the PCI socket, the 3Dfx driver software needs to be loaded onto the computer. Once this is done you are given a new piece of software called ?3Dfx Tools?. This allows you to alter the settings of the card, such as resolution, refresh rate, colour settings, OpenGL settings and so on.

An additional piece of software needs to be downloaded from the 3Dfx website if you want to use the overclocking feature of the card. I have my card running at 180Mhz as I have found this is as much as you can overclock before the software starts to become very unstable and the card gets too hot.

Firing up a piece of software that utilises 3D graphics, you notice the difference immediately. The 3D surfaces in games look smoother and the lighting and blur effects seem more convincing. The frame rate is also noticeably quicker and generally the speed of the game is increased significantly.

I have used many 3D graphics games with this card including Half Life, Quake 2, Quake 3 and Medal of Honour. I have found the card to produce good frame rate levels and graphics performance on all these games. The 64Mb memory and 180Mhz clock rate of the card has a lot to do with this, but it must be remembered that overall frame rates will be governed by other factors, suc
h as the speed of the computer?s processor and how much onboard memory it has.

The range of 2D resolutions available on this card is also impressive. I have mine set on 1024x768, as any resolution greater than this just looks too small on my 15? screen! You really need a much larger monitor I think if you are wanting to make use of the much higher resolutions that this card can provide.

One downside with this card is that because it is becoming a tad outdated now, it is hard to find recently updated software drivers for it. I can imagine that I might struggle to get this card running effectively on my new Windows XP machine, as the software supplied with the card is compatible with Windows 95 and 98 only. Still I?m hoping I can track a suitable XP driver down off the Internet, as this has worked for me in the past!


Conclusion
I would recommend this card to anybody who is looking to improve the graphics performance of the PC.

It is unfortunate that the card is not made any more, and is becoming slightly out of date and won't run some of the latest games. Because of this I can?t give it top marks! However if you come across one second hand, it is well worth considering.

Thanks for reading!

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