3dfx Voodoo 3 2000 (SGRAM) ideas

[TrulyNolan]

So I just scored this 3dfx Voodoo 3 2000 off craigslist for $10. It's fully functional, and even works in an old Power Macintosh with the new drivers. I want to use this for an old school 1999 era build, but I'm not too sure what parts would fit best for this, or even what operating system (Windows 98? 2000?)

 

Any recommendations would be greatly appreciated!

[Mark77]

DirectX that was actually suitable for gaming didn't show up until XP came along, on the NT core.  XP was ~2002-ish.  If you want to go back to 1999, you're looking at Win98 (yuck!) or Windows NT if you could swear off gaming altogether (I chose the latter, and actually graduated college on-time, normally a rare feat!).  The mainstream CPU's of the day in 1999 were single-core Pentium 3's, typically between 450MHz and 600MHz.   In the Slot-1 format.  The Celeron 300A for ~$90 a pop was a popular overclocking option as, with a very simple mod, it was essentially the same as a P3-450 minus a small amount of extra cache.  There was even a motherboard called the Abit (Abit....as in..."A bit" of junk) BP6 which supported a pair of overclocked Celeron 300A's in a SMP configuration.  The Intel i440BX was the chipset du jour, supporting PC100 SDRAM.  AMD was selling their aging K6-2 and K6-3 lineup, and the SlotA Athlons weren't quite around yet.

 

I remember the 2D output of those cards really leaving a lot to be desired at what were then considered to be high resolutions (17" CRTs at 1024x768 were pretty common, 19" was considered higher-end, 21" CRT screens were crazy heavy and expensive!).  But it was a nice advance over the Voodoo2 cards which required not only a separate video card, but a "VGA passthrough" cable connecting the 2D VGA card with the add-in 3D accelerator.