Anybody can personal one of many finest graphics playing cards, however not everybody can get their arms on the long-lasting 3dfx Voodoo 5 6000 graphics card. Nevertheless, this unreleased gem will not come low cost. The cardboard is at the moment at $12,600 in an eBay itemizing and has a number of extra days of bidding earlier than the promoting worth turns into identified. We thought the value was notable a couple of days in the past when it was going for ‘simply’ $5,500.
The Voodoo 5 6000 is a worthwhile artifact as a result of it was the final graphics card that 3dfx made, but it surely by no means arrived available on the market. It is the equal of EVGA’s unreleased GeForce RTX 4090 graphics card that ultimately went to a collector for a whopping $12,400, besides the Voodoo 5 6000 has extra historical past, and it will be attention-grabbing to see what the best bidder is keen to supply.
As noticed by Twitter person Löschzwerg (opens in new tab), a graphics card fanatic and collector put up a Voodoo 5 6000 prototype for public sale on eBay (opens in new tab). That is the true deal, not like the Voodoo 5 6000 replicant we noticed a few years again. With six days left on the public sale, the coveted graphics card will doubtless find yourself promoting for a small fortune.
This can be a Voodoo5 6000 revision 3700A prototype with the total PCI rework. In response to the eBay itemizing, 3dfx engineer Jindrich (Hank) Semenec was the one who personally reworked the graphics card to function stably at FSAA 8x mode. The vendor has reportedly examined the graphics card, and it is “rock stable at 8X.” He additionally claims that this prototype hails from the later levels of the 6K prototype venture, and consequently, most bugs have been ironed out.
The graphics card leveraged 4 VSA-100 processors at 166 MHz, every sporting 32MB 166 MHz SDRAM. As well as, the Voodoo5 6000 was the primary shopper gaming graphics card to boast 128MB of onboard reminiscence. Sadly, the ability necessities had been so demanding that the AGP slot couldn’t adequately feed the Voodoo5 6000. In consequence, the retail samples relied on an exterior energy provide connecting to an AC outlet. Nonetheless, some Voodoo5 6000 prototypes, such because the one from the eBay public sale, use a Molex adapter, and others have the Molex connector soldered to the PCB.
The Voodoo5 6000 was a marvel of a graphics card throughout its time, however the excessive manufacturing price derailed its launch. As well as, the graphics card used a multi-chip (4 VSA-100 chips) design the place competing GeForce and Radeon fashions caught to a single chip. Moreover, the 128MB VRAM and exterior energy brick did not assist the Voodoo5 6000’s trigger. Lengthy story brief, 3dfx ultimately went bankrupt in 2002, and all that’s left are these valuable, unreleased Voodoo relics of the previous.