Installation and Drivers

The installation of the Voodoo 3 3000 was a snap, first I had to remove the ASUS V-3800 TNT2 card from the AGP slot, popped up the new Voodoo 3 and turned the computer on, this is basically all you have to do for installing a video card when using Windows 98, I didn't even have to remove the ASUS drivers or select Standard VGA display, Windows will do it all for you. After booting I put the drivers CD and that was it.

I can say Voodoo 3 drivers are very mature, although people has experienced some problems with older Glide games and there was a problem with the recently released Q3test, you can always get the latest drivers from 3dfx website.

Voodoo 3 3000's out of the box experience was great, although no manuals were included in the box, 3dfx included a Quick Install guide that I think will be enough for beginners to get started. Also this card has got one of the best game bundles I've seen in a long time, it comes with the full version of Need For Speed III, an special version of the still unreleased Descent 3, the full version of Unreal and a coupon for Unreal Tournament, you just have to pay the shipping and a copy of the full game will be sent to you as soon as the game becomes available.

Overclockability

As I mentioned before, the Voodoo 3 3000 comes default clocked at 166mhz for both, core and memory, those are very high speeds compared to what we were used to hear last year, anyway you'll notice that the card doesn't come with a fan but a huge (I really mean HUGE) heatsink that doesn't only covers the chip itself but part of the card.

The drivers didn't include any utility for overclocking the card, something I'm getting used to see in TNT2 boards, anyway I was able to overclock it using a free utility called Voodoo Overclocker.
I was able to get the card running stable at 178mhz (again.. core and memory) but going that high caused some lock-ups when running benchmarking tests, I went down to 175mhz and then everything worked ok.

Performance

I wasn't surprised at all... the Voodoo 3 3000 is a very fast card, no matter if it's overclocked or not you'll be able to play any game at a very high frame rate.

When clocked at 166mhz I found it to be faster than a default clocked (125/150mhz) TNT2, specially in OpenGL games, I haven't tested any Ultra TNT2 in my machine so  can't comment on that but I think any gamer will be happy with Voodoo3's performance. Anyway the biggest difference I could see between the TNT2 and Voodoo3 was in Unreal, one of the few "modern" games that take full advantage of Glide API and maybe the only game that is worth having Glide support in the card (I'm sure I'll get some bad feedback for these comments), I was able to play the game really smooth at 1024x768 while with the TNT2 the speed is good, the difference between the cards is considerable.

Be sure to take a look at the benchmarks in the next two pages in which I include default and overclocked Direct3D, OpenGL and Glide tests.

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