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The
3dfx Voodoo3-3000 PCI
Leading
Edge Technology For The Trailing Edge
User
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Overclocking
The Voodoo3 3000 PCI |
High
end parts on a mid range
board. |
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As
I noted earlier, our Voodoo3 3000 PCI came
with 5.5ns. SDRAM on board which allows for
close to 183 MHz. cycle time. The
heatsink on the board is a standard Voodoo3
heatsink. It is a passive set up
(no fan) but the sink itself is very large and
dissipates a lot of heat. With the stock
setup, we were able to overclock the V3-3K PCI
up 190MHz. but it wasn't all that stable and
there were noticable articfacts on the
screen. Instead, we backed the clock
speed down to 180MHz. As you may
remember, both the Voodoo3 core processor and
memory are tied to the same clock on any of
these boards. In any event, a 180 MHz.
overclock with this card should not be a lofty
goal for most. The card was very stable
and clean at this speed with a noticeable
performance gain over the standard 166MHz.
default speed. We tested the card at
both settings for comparison. |
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Test
System |
The
Voodoo3 3000 in a Voodoo2-like
setup |
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ATX
Medium Tower Case w/ 300Watt PS, Soyo
SY-6BA+III Motherboard and Intel Celeron 300a
Processor clocked at default and 450MHz., 96MB
of PC100 RAM, 5Gig Maxtor UDMA33 5400 RPM
Drive, 3dfx Voodoo3-3000 PCI, 12X Toshiba
CDROM, Sound Blaster Live, Win98SE, DirectX 7
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Hmm,
what's this??? These look like
system specs from about a year
ago! You are correct. What
we intended to do was show you what the
V3-3K PCI could do in a totally middle
of the road system with components that
you can find extremely cheaply these
days. If you can find a Celeron
300a, they go for about $50 and the rest
of the system is strictly older
generation product with the exception of
maybe the sound card. Regardless,
this should give a good indication, if
you are one of those folks on a budget
or don't upgrade your computer every 6
months like some of you hard core
types.
At any
rate, let's see what we've got
here...
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Voodoo3
3000 PCI Benchmarks /
Comparison |
PCI
under fire |
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2000 runs a stressful battery of tests
with the most current Direct X 7.0
requirements. We consider this
benchmark to be the D3D Gauntlet.
ALL
3DMark Test Were Run With A Celeron 300a
at 300MHz.
Here
are all the details of this test, should
you be interested in them. Click the
on image...
As
you can easily see, the Voodoo3 3000 hangs
tough but could use a little more CPU
horsepower behind it. 3DMark really
beats on the processor and has built in
optimizations for SSE and 3DNow! So
we then cranked the processor up to
450MHz. This is a speed that many
Celeron 300a processors can hit.
More
tests this way...
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