Preview of 3Dfx Voodoo3

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STB Now The Only Card Maker Of Voodoo3-Cards In The US

A lot has changed within 3Dfx in the last months, they acquired STB and are now selling their own cards with STB's card manufacturing plants. This upset many of the former 'lovers' of 3Dfx, particularly Creative and Diamond, who will now put a lot of effort into pushing NVIDIA, since this is the only chance they've really got on the 3D-card market. The story looks a bit different in Europe, where STB is hardly known and where 3Dfx depends on other card makers to market their new chips. However, why should any European 3D-card maker be crazy enough to help 3Dfx now, when 3Dfx is anyway planning to take care of the difficult, but big European market by themselves as soon as they can?

The situation is clear, 3Dfx needs the Voodoo3 to be a success, otherwise they'll be in serious trouble. Voodoo3 needs to be a real performance leader, since Banshee was never up to impress any of us performance hungry hardware freaks or hardcore gamers, although it may have sold reasonably well. 3Dfx is at risk of losing their reputation of providing the best and fastest 3D chips and Voodoo3 really needs to be what Banshee never has been. This preview will try to answer the question if the performance of the new Voodoo3 will be good enough for 3Dfx to stay on top of things.

The board I received is a Voodoo3 3500. The PCB is black and thus looking as if it was a Quantum3D-part. Quantum3D has the tradition of only making cards with black PCBs. The chip as well as the memory clock was indeed 183 MHz, the chip is covered by a pretty large heat sink and fan combo and the memory used on the card is 16 MB of 6ns SGRAM from EtronTech. I cannot complain about any excessive chip temperature when running 3D, the fan seems to take good care of Voodoo3's heat production. Unfortunately I couldn't use my thermal probe, because I haven't got one in the US-lab yet. The board runs absolutely stable at the 183 MHz. It features a S-VHS video out that's working fine and a 20-pin digital out driven by the onboard 'LCDfx'-chip. Unfortunately I couldn't test the digital out yet.