bounty 3dfx Voodoo 6000 is my pitch for the next Linus bounty

[thermalgoop]

It's a quad GPU beast that was developed in 2000, but never released. And then 3dfx got bought for parts by nVidia . Pour one out for the homies.

There were about 1,000 units of different variations produced, some requiring an external power supply. They featured 4 VSA100 chips, clocked between 143-183mhz (although the 180mhz+ versions were known to die quickly, as did the earlier slower clocked samples), and 128mb of VRAM (a crapload for the time), and connected via AGP 4X (or PCI? although I've never seen one).Some of the later prototypes were benchmarked favorably against the competition at the time, the GeForce 2 Ultra. It even managed to edge out the at the time unreleased GeForce 3 in many scenarios. 

It'd be a great video to show off where the now dying SLI could have taken us. Maybe show off the dual-GPU GTX295 & 690 alongside? Maybe build custom water cooling blocks and see how high it can overclock?

 

Photo from TechPowerup of an earlier example with the external power supply barrel plug, instead of internal molex, and 3dfx branded fans. 

 

No, I don't have one I'm looking to cash in on. I'd just love to see the content. Best I can offer is a Voodoo 3 3000 in my '99 Falcon NW Mach V, and I don't really want to part with it. 

[Helpful Tech Witch]

doesnt @Valentyn have one of these?

[RejZoR]

Such a shame 3dfx Rampage never materialized. I wonder what current graphic landscape would be if 3dfx managed to release that card back in those days. Then again w eknow Intel is returning to graphics and recently there were also news about new PowerVR graphic cards, the exciting days of year 2000 graphics landscape is returning

[LogicalDrm]

For video suggestions, please use the official thread:

 

And its not like Linus is interested just spending money for one-ofs, they are still business and trying to make money. So its stuff that A) he has some interest or connection to, or B) they can break even or make money with. Doing one video and paying $6k for it, not really smart business-wise.

[Blue4130]

9 hours ago, thermalgoop said:

It's a quad GPU beast that was developed in 2000, but never released. And then 3dfx got bought for parts by nVidia . Pour one out for the homies.

There were about 1,000 units of different variations produced, some requiring an external power supply. They featured 4 VSA100 chips, clocked between 143-183mhz (although the 180mhz+ versions were known to die quickly, as did the earlier slower clocked samples), and 128mb of VRAM (a crapload for the time), and connected via AGP 4X (or PCI? although I've never seen one).Some of the later prototypes were benchmarked favorably against the competition at the time, the GeForce 2 Ultra. It even managed to edge out the at the time unreleased GeForce 3 in many scenarios. 

It'd be a great video to show off where the now dying SLI could have taken us. Maybe show off the dual-GPU GTX295 & 690 alongside? Maybe build custom water cooling blocks and see how high it can overclock?

 

Photo from TechPowerup of an earlier example with the external power supply barrel plug, instead of internal molex, and 3dfx branded fans. 

 

No, I don't have one I'm looking to cash in on. I'd just love to see the content. Best I can offer is a Voodoo 3 3000 in my '99 Falcon NW Mach V, and I don't really want to part with it. 

I had the 5500,man 3dfx cards were great. Wish I held onto that one... 

[thermalgoop]

3 hours ago, Blue4130 said:

I had the 5500,man 3dfx cards were great. Wish I held onto that one... 

Very nice. I'd love to get my hands on one of those. I saw one come up on ShopGoodwill several months ago, but it went for a bit more than I was wanting to pay for 20 year old tech. I'm still hanging onto my family's first computer, a Falcon Northwest Mach V from late '99, with a PIII-450 @ 650-ish mhz and a Voodoo 3000 card. I fire it up at least a couple times a month to play some Quake III or Deus Ex with Glide. 

[Bad5ector]

@CircleTech Man, Asrock used to be notorious for doing stuff like that. Like the AGP / PCIE boards they had. The big PITA was all the jumpers you needed to move over to switch between the two.

[thermalgoop]

On 10/23/2020 at 11:32 AM, CircleTech said:

The real GPU to find isn't the 3DFX 6000, it's the rampage. Apparently a few of them were made and have been sold to collectors for as much as 11K USD:

Spoiler

 

https://hothardware.com/news/3dfx-rampage-gpu-performance-revealed-in-a-book-20-years-later

 

Oh and these things just because they're weird:

 

 

Socket 478 CPU card?

 

Or this thing:

 

 

Socket 478 and LGA 775 motherboard?

 

Another weird mobo asrock has made:

 

 

Basically any motherboard with two totally different CPUs on it is a good canaidate.

 

 

Trust me, there's a LOT of bizzare hardware out there. Linus should have no trouble covering the weird, rare, and bizzare computer hardware over plenty of episodes.

Yeah, but I don't see him paying $11k to make a video or two. A V6000 can be had for considerably less (about 1/10th the 3dfx Rampage), because they actually made quite a few of them, and he could still stand to make a profit on interesting content about hardware that most of his viewers will probably have never seen before. 

[GDRRiley]

1 hour ago, thermalgoop said:

Yeah, but I don't see him paying $11k to make a video or two. A V6000 can be had for considerably less (about 1/10th the 3dfx Rampage), because they actually made quite a few of them, and he could still stand to make a profit on interesting content about hardware that most of his viewers will probably have never seen before. 

don't quote that long of a comment we don't need to read it twice

[FaxedForward]

Real MVP is the Jazz Multimedia Rendition V2200 “Bonnie and Clyde” GPU that had both PCI and AGP connections; you could flip it over and move the I/O plate to the other side to use either or.