Badass rebuilds unreleased Voodoo 5 6000 card.

https://www.modlabs.net/forum/topic/60674/

TLDR;
Badass rebuilds an unreleased 3Dfx Voodoo 5 6000, complete with custom PCB and “authentic” power delivery to beat mimic the advertised specs at the time. They even went so far as simulating the known bugs that caused it to go unreleased in its day.
What sort of hash rate we looking at here?
 
Last edited:
I don't say this often, but that is one sexy piece of tech. (y)


1_5.jpg
 
The first V5 6000 prototype was a "2x2" design where all four VSA-100 chips were in a quad.

v5-6k3.jpg


Most of these were either non-functional prototypes for marketing/press purposes, or had a very short life. This design was abandoned because it required a ridiculous 12 layer PCB, where the V5 5500 was a 6 layer PCB and most other cards were a 4 layer PCB.

All of the later prototypes had all of the VSA-100 chips lined up in the same configuration this reverse engineered card does. The only real difference this card has over the final prototypes is the power circuitry and the fact it uses a PCI connector instead of AGP 2x.

v5-6k1.jpg
 
And I thought the Asus RTX3090 Strix was a huge card! I saw a photograph of that Voodoo 5 9000 some months ago and thought it was a Photoshop job.
 
That is amazing. I held out for a v5 6000 in high school all the way till it was canceled, then promptly went and bought a GeForce 2 Ultra.

It’s a shame that scalable architecture is currently dead - it would be nice to be able to really amp up a build to silly levels.
 
https://www.modlabs.net/forum/topic/60674/

TLDR;
Badass rebuilds an unreleased 3Dfx Voodoo 5 6000, complete with custom PCB and “authentic” power delivery to beast mimic the advertised specs at the time. They even went so far as simulating the known bugs that caused it to go unreleased in its day.
Wow.. people are really getting desperate for cards. Lol.
 
Freshly printed ink on that logo is so retro and looks sweet. Not sure if this was asked but are they harvesting chips from existing Voodoo cards for this or are they able to make new ones?
 
Freshly printed ink on that logo is so retro and looks sweet. Not sure if this was asked but are they harvesting chips from existing Voodoo cards for this or are they able to make new ones?
somehow its possible to buy new (or at least new old stock) bare VSA-100 chips. dunno where they're coming from but I see a seller on Ebay with some
 
somehow its possible to buy new (or at least new old stock) bare VSA-100 chips. dunno where they're coming from but I see a seller on Ebay with some

Quantum3D has a lot to do with it. They were spun off from 3dfx in 1997 to concentrate on coin-op and trainers/simulators. Being a spinoff, they used pretty much exclusively 3dfx hardware until even several years after 3dfx's official demise.

You could get an AAlchemy system with up to 4 x 8164 boards, which would give you 32 VSA-100 chips, each having 64 MB of RAM for a total of 2 GB.
 
Quantum3D has a lot to do with it. They were spun off from 3dfx in 1997 to concentrate on coin-op and trainers/simulators. Being a spinoff, they used pretty much exclusively 3dfx hardware until even several years after 3dfx's official demise.

You could get an AAlchemy system with up to 4 x 8164 boards, which would give you 32 VSA-100 chips, each having 64 MB of RAM for a total of 2 GB.
ah, that makes sense. The kind of sim & visualization customers that would buy a system like that would expect long-term support and that seems like the kind of mfg situation where there's lots of old stock around. Pretty cool that these chips are still available and being put on cards by diy'ers!
 
I would build a win 98/2000 machine if I could get hold of one of these babies.
I had an agp v5500, but gave it away a long time ago.
Motherboards with a pci slot are still common enough to be found easily.
 
Nvidia only bought the intellectual property of 3dfx in 2000.

It was the fab they bought that drove the company into the toilet
 
Nvidia only bought the intellectual property of 3dfx in 2000.

It was the fab they bought that drove the company into the toilet
I’m pretty sure it wasn’t just buying the Fab. IIRC, there was an earthquake that took the fab offline for months after the purchase. That certainly had a big impact too.
 
PCI interface instead of AGP?

I assume they did that as PCI is still on some modern boards, where as AGP died off almost 15+ years ago. Now if they really want to go crazy, they can put a PCIe interface on it and then anyone can use it on almost anything newish.
 
I assume they did that as PCI is still on some modern boards, where as AGP died off almost 15+ years ago. Now if they really want to go crazy, they can put a PCIe interface on it and then anyone can use it on almost anything newish.
My last two motherboards did not come with any PCI slots on it. They both had two x16 PCI-E slots and a varying number of x1 slots. I know there are still some that have them, but they seem to be hard to find.
 
https://www.modlabs.net/forum/topic/60674/

TLDR;
Badass rebuilds an unreleased 3Dfx Voodoo 5 6000, complete with custom PCB and “authentic” power delivery to beast mimic the advertised specs at the time. They even went so far as simulating the known bugs that caused it to go unreleased in its day.
Can't get to the site.. Malewarebytes is blocking it due to trojan:

Website blocked due to trojan​

Website blocked: www.modlabs.net

Malwarebytes Browser Guard blocked this website because it may contain malware activity.​

We strongly recommend you do not continue.​


I figure the forum is ok, so click continue to site, it blocks it again...

Can someone paste the post + pictures here?
 
Can't get to the site.. Malewarebytes is blocking it due to trojan:

Website blocked due to trojan​

Website blocked: www.modlabs.net

Malwarebytes Browser Guard blocked this website because it may contain malware activity.​

We strongly recommend you do not continue.​


I figure the forum is ok, so click continue to site, it blocks it again...

Can someone paste the post + pictures here?
1614035230980.png
1614035245183.png
1614035260714.png
 
My last two motherboards did not come with any PCI slots on it. They both had two x16 PCI-E slots and a varying number of x1 slots. I know there are still some that have them, but they seem to be hard to find.

Yeah it is much harder to find upper end mobos with PCI now, most of the lower and office grade ones still do though. Plus they do make convertors to change PCIe 1X slots to PCI. Plus I wonder with them being PCI if you could run these new cards in SLI.....
 
Supposedly the creator of this is planning to sell cards and the ask is $1500 (assuming USD). Not sure how to feel about that. On the one hand I'm sure it cost that much in time and effort on the other, it's a big ask for a card that isn't "real".
 
Supposedly the creator of this is planning to sell cards and the ask is $1500 (assuming USD). Not sure how to feel about that. On the one hand I'm sure it cost that much in time and effort on the other, it's a big ask for a card that isn't "real".

He can ask whatever he wants. Someone will buy it. That someone won't be me, but someone will buy it. I have a friend who invests in Magic The Gathering cards. He tells me some of them sell for thousands of dollars. If you want to spend the equivalent of a new car on a small piece of cardboard with a picture printed on it, cool, you do you. Enough people are, apparently.
 
I'd be impressed if he wrote a working driver.

The Voodoo5 6000 has had community supported drivers for decades, it uses the same VSA-100 chips as the 5500 and Voodoo4 4500, so driver support isn't difficult at all. All 3dfx cards have been supported in some way by 3rd party drivers, Amigamerlin being one of the most popular, but there are others. There are even drivers for Windows 7, 8 and 10, though with reduced functionality since they're DX6 cards. Some functions have to be emulated on the host CPU.

The only card that has problems with drivers are the handful of Spectre 2000 boards. They were in an alpha state and only a handful of not really working chips existed before 3dfx closed. I think gdonovan has one of these boards.
 
He's making a few of them with packaging as well, $1500 or thereabouts.
 
Back
Top