Installation

Installation was painless as expected, simply uninstalling 3dfx tools & shutting down. Removing my older Voodoo3 2000 & then slotting in the Voodoo 3 3000PCI. Boot up, let windows detect a PCI-VGA display adapter & then install the latest 3dfx drivers. Re-boot. No problem.

Overclockability

This I was really looking forward to testing out. My old Voodoo3 2000 has been running at 175Mhz pretty much since I bought it earlier this year. I was hoping to see this card perform just was well for me.

Cranking up the Mhz with the Voodoo 3 overclocker I got it up to 198Mhz (so far). Using the same cooling method as described in the Voodoo3 tweak guide.

Currently there have been no problems experienced (such as lockups, freezes, etc.) at this speed although I’d rather not push it any further until I get to add a fan to the topside of the card.

DVD hardware assist ?

As I recently discovered while reading the PC-DVD Informational text this “feature” of the Voodoo 3 offers no real acceleration effect at all:

"Colour space conversion exists in a totally different unit then MPEG-2 decoding, which the 3dfx FAQ claims that their "planar-to-packed conversion in hardware" will accelerate playback. In reality, 30 fps is 30fps. The Voodoo3 can't accelerate a hardware DVD decoder any further for the simple fact that they already offer a FULL 30fps. To put it simply, there is no DVD hardware assist in the Voodoo3 chipset. It will perform just as equal to any other chipset without hardware acceleration."

Note that this is also true of cards like TNT2 & G400. This is just a small point that probably has more to do with marketing the card more than anything else. As mentioned above I encountered no problems with DVD playback on this card. I was also very satisfied with the image quality of it. Below is a screen capture from Blade.

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