One of 3dfx’s Final, Quad-chip Video Card Was Sold For $15,000
One of 3dfx’s Final, Quad-chip Video Card Was Sold For $15,000
The card was never sold to the public more than 20 years ago when the company was eventually folded and absorbed into NVIDIA.
The 3dfx Voodoo 5 is among the rarest video cards in existence – as it never went past the prototype phase, only a small number of them exist in the wild. Sometimes they see themselves in auction sites like eBay, in this case.
This particular card is the Voodoo 5 6000, a quad-GPU monstrosity that was powered by, you guessed it, 4 physical graphics processors (VSA-100). Not to be confused with the multi-chip design seen in AMD’s RDNA 3 GPUs, these are the kind that have more in relation to something like NVIDIA GTX TITAN Z or the AMD Radeon R9 295X2 – except with double the chip counts.
It’s not easy to wrap around with the specs on offer here since they are, in retrospect, miniscule – but remember in early 2000s, it had 128MB of VRAM which was the largest-ever for consumer GPUs at the time. However, this being a prototype meant there’s quirks and bugs: among those include an incompatibility with Intel Pentium 4 systems due to bugs in AGP 4x support.
Image: eBay
This prototype, labeled “3700A” was apparently reworked by former 3dfx engineer Hank Semenc and supports 8x FSAA, with various bugfixes; it was sold for $15,000 USD when the bids ended at Feb 12.
Source: Videocardz | eBay
Pokdepinion: Definitely a piece of computing history living in this card.
