Voodoo 5 5500 amid other goodies

[beachycove]

I picked up a G3 Platinum Minitower overclocked to 466MHz today, with a Voodoo 5 5500 PCI card installed (the one with DVI and VGA). The Voodoo card was, of course, the real prize.

Other contents included an optical burner in the unit, 3 x 18GB 68-pin Seagate SCSI drives, an Adaptec LVD SCSI controller card, a combo USB/Firewire PCI card, and 512MB RAM. The tower has the full Wings personality card installed. There were also misc. power cords, a mouse, etc. in the lot.

Separately, I came across 20 shrinkwrapped HD floppies in a charity shop for a metaphorical song. My old floppy disks are not doing so well, so it is good to have some fresh stock.

The G3 is not in the best of shape cosmetically, so it will likely become a parts machine. But what good parts.

 

[Unknown_K]

That 5500 is the mac edition then, the PC ones had just VGA I think.

 

[Osgeld]

Voodoo 5 5500

The Voodoo 5 5500 comes in three flavors: a universal AGP version (AGP 1/2x, prototypes were made with AGP4x-interface) with full sideband support, PCI, and the Mac Edition, which is only available for PCI, though could run in 66 MHz PCI slots. The Mac Edition has a DVI- and a VGdition had a DVI- and a VGA-A-out, the other versions just have one VGA-out.

In games, the Voodoo 5 5500 is able to outperform the NVIDIA GeForce 256 and ATI Rage 128 MAXX, but unfortunately Voodoo5 5500 was late to market and was up against the new GeForce 2 GTS and Radeon DDR instead. The GeForce2 GTS is able to outperform the Voodoo 5.[5]

As a former long time owner as a Geforce 2 GTS I can attest that it kicked the voodoo 5500 right in the ... and the voodoo was much more expensive

 

[beachycove]

It is the Mac edition. I have had one for years running in an 8600/300 (604ev) that we have here in the house, in which it behaves itself just fine, though I gather that they were designed for the faster PCI architecture of the Platinum G3 series.

I am not especially interested in the gaming side of things, and have decent PCI cards for such as is done around here in the gaming side of things already. Of greater interest to me are two things: the DVI port, and the fact that a boxed Voodoo 5 5500 Macintosh Edition recently sold on a certain auction site for US$150. Hey, I have a box from the one in the 8600 that I've had for years, and that ballpark sum would finance my tinkering with the older and slower stuff for quite a while.

So do I keep it or sell it on? Hmm.

 

[Unknown_K]

I know Amiga users with PCI busboard upgrades love the PCI Voodoo 5500 because they have drivers that support 3dfx.

As far as keeping it or selling it, that depends what you will do with the money. I have quite a few pricey goodies in my collection that I do not think of selling since I would just blow the money on something else anyway and have nothing to show for it.

 

[Quadraman]

I have a PC PCI version of the 5500 that I bought for a liquidation price of $75 unopened shortly after 3dfx threw in the towel. I got it because it was looking at that time like the PCI interface was going to die out in favor of AGP and I didn't have a motherboard with an AGP slot and here we are today with PCIe 16x and PCI cards are still being made. I didn't get to use it much because I got a GF4MX440 card for an even better price not long after.