Weird Connectors on Graphics cards

Hoolio

Distinguished
Jun 26, 2002
291
0
18,780
Hey, I recently removed a Graphics card from my pc and I looked at the old and new cards, now the old card was a voodoo 3 3500TV.

Why do cards have a connector that looks like it is for a ribbon cable (labeled J1) and looks like a link up to a voodoo 2 or something, and another jumper labeled P4 that has 6 pins in a line.

Just wondering if anyone can tell me what they are?
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~jab701/
 

gothitbycar

Distinguished
Dec 16, 2002
513
0
18,980
Im not positive to what it is but i believe you were able to hook up two Voodoo cards together to effectlively double its speed. Voodoo never had an AGP card (did they? the Voodoo 5 looked semi-powerful at the time,) so they were all PCI. Being PCI you could have more than one graphics card in at a time.
I never had a Voodoo card before so im not entirely positive. Maybe someone who had a Voodoo 3 before can answer the question better and I'd be interested to see what kind of performance gains can be expected by connecting two Voodoo Cards.

~I dont have one so I want it
 

Crashman

Polypheme
Former Staff
What cards? Some cards have a video passthrough connection, sometimes called a "feature connector", but those aren't as common as they used to be.

<font color=blue>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to a hero as big as Crashman!</font color=blue>
<font color=red>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to an ego as large as Crashman's!</font color=red>
 

Hoolio

Distinguished
Jun 26, 2002
291
0
18,780
The Voodoo 3500TV is an AGP card, infact 3dfx made AGP cards in the Voodoo 3 and up, just wondering what these cards did.

What actually connected to the feature connector?
 

Hoolio

Distinguished
Jun 26, 2002
291
0
18,780
I forgot they were called feature connectors, a search yielded this result:

http://www.pcguide.com/ref/video/if.htm

Video Feature Connector (VFC): This original feature connector was part of the original VGA specification. Standard VFCs are 8-bit ports using a 26-pin connector, and are limited to the lower resolutions and color depths of standard VGA. This is now an obsolete standard and is not used by higher-end cards.
VESA Advanced Feature Connector (VAFC): Developed by VESA as an extension to VFC, VAFC widens the port from 8 bits to 16 or 32, and provides improved signaling for more reliability. The VAFC provides a high-bandwidth conduit to the video card and uses an 80-pin connector.
VESA Media Channel (VMC): This is a more advanced standard that in essence, defines another bus within the PC for interfacing together multiple video streams. This system allows several units to be integrated together in a sort of "back alley" bus, and uses a 68-pin connector.

Counting the pins on my card, J1 has 26 pins, so is obviously a basic feature connector. Still all bets are off to what connector P4 is?