World’s First Voodoo 4 Powered Laptop Lives 24 Years After The Death Of 3dfx
3dfx Voodoo graphics processors never gained much traction in the laptop market in their day, because putting a power-thirsty discrete graphics processor—an idea that 3dfx arguably pioneered—into a laptop was seen as an absurd venture at the time. Despite that, 24 years after the launch of the 3dfx Voodoo4 4500, incidentally the same year NVIDIA bought the company, one very dedicated enthusiast has created what he calls a "Voodoo 4 M4800"—a Voodoo 4 on an MXM card for laptops.
The final (for now) product: Voodoo 4 M4800 installed in a Dell Precision M4800 laptop.
There's no tricks, no "gotchas", no fakery like sticking a Raspberry Pi in an NES cartridge and claiming you made the NES play DOOM. sdz has actually created a custom MXM carrier board for the Voodoo VSA-100 processor and with a little help from an FPGA, hooked it up to a laptop through an MXM slot. The laptop in question is a Dell Precision M4800—quite a bit newer than any Voodoo products, as it uses 4th-gen Intel Core processors, but old enough that it can still work well with Windows XP.
Like many latter-day Voodoo enthusiast products, sdz's Voodoo 4 project offers both overclocking and the option to increase the memory capacity from the original 32 MB to 64 MB. With the extra RAM and an overclock to 192 MHz (from 166 MHz stock), he gets a 3DMark 2001 SE result of 2035 3DMarks—among the highest ever recorded for a single VSA-100 chip.
