3dfx Voodoo4 4500 & Voodoo5 5500 Preview

Unlike the Voodoo3 series, which featured varying clock speeds depending on the board, (the Voodoo3 2000 had a 143MHz clock, the Voodoo3 3000 had a 166MHz clock and the Voodoo3 3500 had a 183MHz clock), the Voodoo4/5 boards are all based on the same VSA-100 chip clocked at 166MHz. 

The boards differentiate themselves by featuring more memory (but still 32MB per chip) and more VSA-100 chips.  This means that 3dfx doesn’t have to worry about yield problems holding them back from releasing the faster boards; if they can make a Voodoo4 4500, they can also make a Voodoo5 6000.  The only thing holding them back would be the cost/availability of memory and the availability of VSA-100 chips because they could make twice as many Voodoo5 5500s from a batch of 100 VSA-100 chips as they could Voodoo5 6000s. 

The beauty of the Voodoo5 5500 AGP as an evaluation sample is that, by disabling one of the chips, we essentially have a 32MB Voodoo4 4500 AGP card that we can also use to illustrate the performance we can expect out of that solution.

3dfx outfitted our evaluation board with eight 8MB 6ns SDRAM chips manufactured by Hyundai.  The 6ns rating means that these chips should be able to work at 166MHz (which is what they’re clocked at) and not much higher.  However, SDRAM chips are generally rated pretty liberally, meaning that a chip rated at 166MHz might be able to hit 183MHz. 

Below you’ll see a picture of the board we received from 3dfx.  As you probably already know, it draws its power from the +5V power rail of your power supply courtesy of the 4-pin power connector present on the board. 

The reason for the board’s incredible length is because all the components required to regulate the power supplied to the board must be present, instead of relying on the AGP slot to provide the power and the motherboard to regulate the power supplied. 

While we didn’t have any problems with the Voodoo5 5500 card in most of our test beds, the card did provide us with some problems when used on the ASUS P3V4X motherboard using the Apollo Pro 133A chipset.  The system would POST, but after detecting the installed drives, the system would almost always hang.  We can’t explain the issue, but it is most likely because of the pre-release nature of the hardware. 

Other than this one issue, we had no problems with the hardware.