Voodoo 5 6000 DIY, an enthusiast recreates the legendary 3dfx board

If you are passionate about hardware and gamers, but now you are differently young, you will surely remember 3dfx – and not because someone recently made it out of LEGO. 3dfx represented for a long time, in the glorious 90s, the reference for the video card industry with Voodoo solutions, API Glide and even SLI technology.

Wrong projects and choices, together with growing competition from companies like Nvidia and ATI (now AMD), decreed its decline and at the beginning of the new millennium 3dfx went into bankruptcy. Nvidia acquired much of its intellectual property. In the last few remnants of activity, 3dfx engineers worked on some projects, including the Voodoo 5 6000, a card that officially it never made it to the market, also for some technical problems (with the AGP interface and in rendering). They are said to have been produced a thousand prototypes.

The card showed up with 4 GPUs, 128 MB of VRAM and external power to the PC, which made it a very powerful board for the time – as later prototype tests showed – but probably also very expensive, and therefore not congenial to saving 3dfx from its dire fate. Over the years, several prototypes have been sold on auction sites, but some have thought build it from scratch. Yes, you read that right, as reported by Hothardware, an enthusiast named “Anthony” of the forum russo Mod Labs he has recreated on his own the Voodoo 5 6000.

This crazy (but undoubtedly admirable) enthusiast has it first purchased the four VSA-100 GPUs (Voodoo Scalable Architecture-100): They are still around, and one costs less than $ 20. Think that it is a 112 mm2 chip, made at 250 nanometers and with 14 million transistors (prehistory!). The next step in the work of “reverse engineering“, that is of reverse engineering, was to create a PCB (of a certainly more captivating black than the original green) on which he placed 16 8MB 166MHz SDRAM memory chips (each GPU is connected to 32MB of memory). The only difference from the original design is that the card it does not require an external power supply, but relies on a 4 pin molex.

According to Anthony the “new Voodoo 5 6000” behaves exactly like the original one. “Performance is the same. Same BIOS, drivers, bugs. And very importantly, no Voodoo 5 6000 was harmed or killed during the reverse engineering process.” What to say if not congratulations?