3dfx Voodoo33000 PCI

3dfx Voodoo33000 PCI - Page 2

The 3dfx Voodoo3-3000 PCI 
Leading Edge Technology For The Trailing Edge User

 
Overclocking The Voodoo3 3000 PCI
High end parts on a mid range board.
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.
 

 

Test System 
The Voodoo3 3000 in a Voodoo2-like setup

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

  
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... 

  
Voodoo3 3000 PCI Benchmarks / Comparison
PCI under fire
 

3DMark 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...

 

Tags:  PC, 3D, pci, 3dfx, voodoo, fx

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