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Stomped has posted a Voodoo 5 5500 PCI review.



3dfx has just released the Voodoo 5 5500 PCI. Some people may be wondering why on earth people would want to buy a high end PCI 3D Acclerator. Some of the reasons include using the PCI card for dual monitor support in Win98, having a built in video adapter with which the only way to upgrade is a PCI slot, some K6 systems with PCI motherboards, and those that want FSAA gaming. Technically, old Pentium systems could use the Voodoo 5 too but those people would really be wasting their money on the effort and should focus on a CPU/motherboard upgrade. I decided to test on a wide range of systems to give people an idea of what to expect in some of the circumstances above. I also used a Voodoo 5 AGP on the Pentium III system to see just how much performance is lost by going to PCI. It turns out there is not a big hit since the Voodoo 5 does not transfer texture memory over the AGP bus anyway. The main speed increase is due to the AGP´s 66MHz bus versus the 33MHz PCI bus.
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