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Voodoo 5 6000 GPU, unreleased swan song in 3dfx.
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Voodoo 5 6000 is four VSA-100 processors, each with its own fan.
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A small heatsink is attached to the back of each VSA-100 GPU. Each GPU can access 32MB of RAM spread across four 8MB chips for a total of 128MB of RAM spread across 16 chips.
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The Voodoo 5 6000 never retailed.
Graphics cards cost more than they used to, but more Expensive if it’s also a rare collector’s item. A prototype of the latest version of his unannounced Voodoo 5 6000 (intended as the flagship of the Voodoo 5 GPU family) went on sale for his $15,000 on eBay this week.
The GPU is said to be in “good health” and seems to be fully functional. His gtastuntcrew302 of the seller posted a screenshot of the card on which he achieved a score of 6,995 in his 3DMark 2000 run at 1024×768 resolution. According to Piotr Gontarczyk’s Polish history of his 3dfx, these cards were never sold in retail and only about 1,000 prototypes were made.
“This card has been personally rebuilt for a fully stable 8X FSAA by renowned 3DFX engineer Hank Semenuk (I have personally confirmed that this card is rock solid at 8X)” The seller wrote “Unlike many of his other Voodoo 5 6000 prototypes, this is from the late stages of his 6K prototype project and has the majority of bugs worked out.”
Based on the same VSA-100 architecture as the single GPU Voodoo 4 4500 and dual GPU Voodoo 5 5500, the 6000 contains a total of four VSA-100 chips that can access 32MB of RAM each. It could have outperformed the modern GeForce 2 and Radeon 7000 series GPUs, but each of these GPUs used a single chip, making them much easier to manufacture and cheaper to buy. became. Also, the VSA-100 did not fully support the Direct3D 7 and Direct3D 8 graphics APIs. Both were supported by Nvidia and ATI GPUs at the time.
Early prototypes had data corruption bugs and were limited to twice the speed of AGP, but this eBay listing seems to have fixed those bugs. The retail version of the card required more power than the AGP graphics slot could provide, so an external power brick was required. Unusual at the time, virtually all GPUs today require additional power through some internal connector. The prototype draws extra power from an internal 4-pin Molex connector commonly used for hard drives, optical drives, and other internal accessories at the time.
Nvidia purchased 3dfx in the late 2000s, before products such as the Voodoo 5 6000 hit the market. Nvidia and ATI (and AMD after AMD bought ATI) are the only players in the dedicated graphics market for over 20 years until Intel finally launches his first Arc dedicated GPU in 2022. was a major player in
Listing image by gtastuntcrew302/eBay
