Question about Voodoo5 5500

[PanoramixDruida]

Is the Voodoo5 5500 AGP 4x?, or only AGP 1x and 2x?.
Thanks.

[sloomy]

this "problem" was talked many times in this forum.. but anyway.

Yes Voodoo5 5500 can only work with  3,3V. And most of them is produced for AGP 1x and AGP 2x. There are a few rare prototypes of voodoo5 cards, which were also build for AGP 4x.

Do not try to test the card with a motherboard , which is not supporting 3,3V, because you can damage your motherboard and your Voodoo card... Today, many motherboards have only 1,8 V ( not sure.. ) AGP Voltage..

[PanoramixDruida]

Ok. Thanks.

[bloodworm]

you will not be able to pysically put a 3.3 volt voodoo card into a slot that can't run it.  the card doesn't have the extra slot that the AGP port will have a tab for.

[amp_man]

Also, if you have a 1/2/4x mobo, the card will not run at the 4x (I was playing with this earlier this week). Believe it or not, the card runs best at AGP 1x.

[Ragnarok72]

What about the AGP "Fastwrite" thing?  Would a V5 5500 freak out or something if you enable it or what?

[InSomNiaN]

Lol, the voodoo5 doesn't support fastwrite, so you wouldn't gain any performance.
A while ago I read a FAQ about fastwrite on the nvidia line of cards, and it actually lowered the performance, rather than achieved a gain.....

[darkfalz]

Revision   2.0
Rate   1x, 2x, 4x (2x enabled)
Aperture Size   64 MB
Sideband Addressing   supported (enabled)
Fast Write   supported (disabled)

As you can see, the Voodoo5 works fine with both 4x and Fast Write enabled in the BIOS, it just doesn't utilise them.

[Ragnarok72]

Originally posted by InSomNiaN

Lol, the voodoo5 doesn't support fastwrite, so you wouldn't gain any performance.
A while ago I read a FAQ about fastwrite on the nvidia line of cards, and it actually lowered the performance, rather than achieved a gain.....

I wasn't really worried about performance, just if whether or not activating it would potentially fry the card or something.  I'm lucky enough as it is to have my AGP V5 5500 run on a P4 chipset, so I'd rather not risk anything that'd rock the boat (or slot ) too much.

[amp_man]

I would love to see you set that thing to AGP 4x. I set it to 4x in the BIOS, and everything there seemed fine, but then when I got into windows, everything (drivers, 3D Mark, dxdiag) reports 2x. And the 3dfx tools don't give the 4x option. Also, don't bother with the fast writes, I don't care what your system says, the V5 doesn't support them, so there is a risk of hardware damage.

[beta]

You won't fry your voodoo5 with a BIOS setting.  If you have a 3.3v AGP 1.0 voodoo5 5500 AGP like most Voodoo5's, then you can only install it in AGP 1.0 and AGP Universal 2.0 motherboards.  The slot keying prevents incorrect installation.  A 2.0 Uni. board is what you have, this is basicaly an AGP 1.0 and 2.0 chipset combined.  So it can support your Voodoo5 5500 3.3V AGP.  If you set the AGP bus to 4x clocks per cycle the interface will automatically fall down to 2x when it detects that a 3.3v device is installed.  The next problem is the nature of the AGP bus, which doesn't support devices like the Voodoo5 (single board SLI), so it falls back to PCI operation, just double the speed.  The aperture is also useless as the Voodoo5 does not support Direct Memory Execute mode.  In short:  you can set 4x AGP and a huge aperture from CMOS setup, but you're wasting your time.

[Ragnarok72]

Originally posted by beta

You won't fry your voodoo5 with a BIOS setting.  If you have a 3.3v AGP 1.0 voodoo5 5500 AGP like most Voodoo5's, then you can only install it in AGP 1.0 and AGP Universal 2.0 motherboards.  The slot keying prevents incorrect installation.  A 2.0 Uni. board is what you have, this is basicaly an AGP 1.0 and 2.0 chipset combined.  So it can support your Voodoo5 5500 3.3V AGP.

Correct on all counts.  In case you're wondering about the motherboard chipset in particular that I'm using the V5 AGP on, its the SiS645.

If you set the AGP bus to 4x clocks per cycle the interface will automatically fall down to 2x when it detects that a 3.3v device is installed.  The next problem is the nature of the AGP bus, which doesn't support devices like the Voodoo5 (single board SLI), so it falls back to PCI operation, just double the speed.

Even if the two architectures were compatible, it's not like it would have done any better performance-wise, as it seemed 3Dfx planned to ignore those features of the bus anyway. Of course, I may be wrong, for all I know the V4 (which seems to be the only 3Dfx card that had the capability to actually use those features, aside from the possibility of the V5 6k and it's bridge chip...) actually used them.

Yet....sound cards such as the SBLive! show that even the PCI bus is capable of allocating System RAM as if it was an actual dedicated pool of RAM on the card, so in theory it should still be possible to pull off some AGP-style texture storage even with a PCI card....

The aperture is also useless as the Voodoo5 does not support Direct Memory Execute mode.  In short:  you can set 4x AGP and a huge aperture from CMOS setup, but you're wasting your time.

Heh...it'd be like that one scene on The Simpsons with the goggles and the dangerous acid, only parodied:

"My Framerate!! THE SETTINGS!  THEY DO NOTHING!!!"

[Blazkowicz]

Originally posted by Ragnarok72
Yet....sound cards such as the SBLive! show that even the PCI bus is capable of allocating System RAM as if it was an actual dedicated pool of RAM on the card, so in theory it should still be possible to pull off some AGP-style texture storage even with a PCI card....

I think that's the 3dfx drivers do
It's visible when playing UT2003/2004 with too high texture settings, or a map particularly rich in textures.
texture swapping comes in and the framerate drops in the 2fps range

even the voodoo1 seems to support it (when playing quake3 on mesaFX)