A YouTuber by the name of Michael Dale recently got his hands on a very cool piece of retro-tech which includes a graphics card equipped with both a Voodoo 3 3500 chip and a PowerVR PCX2 chip and is designed specifically for gamers who still play very old titles from the late 90s or early 2000s. The board was custom built by Anthony Zxclxiv.
This card is very unique in that it has two separate GPUs you can access depending on the games you want to play, and even features a pass-through port, so you can run a more modern GPU in your system, alongside this card without needing to change display cables. The card runs on a standard PCI slot (not to be confused with PCI Express).
The card looks really good, despite housing 25-year-old GPUs. The entire card is all black, with a black PCB, heatsinks, RAM, and other components.
The GPUs equipped with this graphics card were very popular in the late 90s, especially the Voodoo 3 3500. The Voodoo 3 was one of the highest performing GPUs you could buy in 1999 and has a reputation that lives on to this day due to its popularity. The Voodoo 3 came in three flavors, the 2000, 3000, and 3500. The 3500 was the most powerful model with a 183 MHz core clock on the GPU and 350MHz on the RAM, as well as 16MB of dedicated memory.
What made the Voodoo 3 such a great card at the time was its excellent performance that was on par with every other top performing graphics card in 1999 and great compatibility with a ton of games on the market as well. Other graphics cards competitors did have some advantages like HD texture capabilities, but overall the Voodoo 3 was a great all-around card that did everything you wanted it to do.
The 2nd chip is an older PowerVR PCX2 chip that was originally made in 1997. This card was designed primarily as a 3D-only accelerator board and would have to be used in conjunction with a 2D video card in your system. Being 2 years older, the PCX2 is significantly slower than the Voodoo 3, but its age will allow the card to play games that were made in 1996 and 1997 like the original Tomb Raider.
This card is definitely not for the masses, but one for gamers who love to play titles from the mid-to-late 90s, like Quake, Wing Commander, and Tomb Raider. These games are so old that they will not work at all on any type of modern hardware, which is where cards like these come into play.
