Voodoo5 vs Voodoo3...

[flaviosr]

Hi to all again,

my "SuperA1200" has the following HW:
* Blizzard 603+ 240/50 (with 256 Mb 60 ns)
* Mediator 1200 first type
  * SB128 (I have just bought a Terratec 512i)
  * Voodoo3 3000
  * D-Link DFE-530TX
  * Elbox Spider II USB
* DCE FlickerMagic
* Elbox PC-Key 1200
* HyperCOM 3+ clockport
* HK Computer Vector Maus & Joystick adapter (plus)
* IDE-Fix 97 with Plextor PX-810SA & Maxtor 6Y080L0-YAR
I am using the last revision of the drivers sent by Elbox!
Every is ok (apart the problem with the SCSI of the Blizzard) until...

... today...

I tried to connect a Voodoo5 5500... I connected the power and everything was good!
But after an hour... It does not work anymore!
The strange thing is that the card is seen perfectly by PCIInfo but it does not display anything!!! ABSURD!!!

Any suggestions?

Thanx again

[KThunder]

what psu do you have on that rig. the voodoo5 does use more power than the voodoo3 and you have quite a bit of hw. my first thought when i upgrade my system and something works temporarily or intermittantly is power.

[flaviosr]

what psu do you have on that rig. the voodoo5 does use more power than the voodoo3 and you have quite a bit of hw. my first thought when i upgrade my system and something works temporarily or intermittantly is power.

Well, I have what I think it's the standard PSU for a Power Tower.
It's a 230 W PSU and I think it's enough... Uff... it's a very strange situation!

[Piru]

Any suggestions?

Go back to Voodoo3, it's better supported anyway.

[flaviosr]

Go back to Voodoo3, it's better supported anyway.

SIGH and ARGH!!!

[Lando]

I also replaced my Voodoo3 with a Voodoo 5 back when I had an A4000 with Mediator.  I found it was unstable and when it did work it was slower in benchmarks and in Quake than the Voodoo3.  I think Elbox's drivers leave something to be desired.  I went back to the Voodoo 3 and the Voodoo 5 went to eBay.

[Hell Labs]

Well, I have what I think it's the standard PSU for a Power Tower.
It's a 230 W PSU and I think it's enough... Uff... it's a very strange situation!

Listen to your inner toolman and add more power!

[flaviosr]

Listen to your inner toolman and add more power!

The devil whispers!

[Amigaz]

Can also confirm that the V5 was a bit slower than the V3 when I used it in my A1200 and A4000 mediator boxes

Build a nice 3dfx GLide games box with the V5 instead ;-)

[Plaz]

I'll just add my 2 cents and re-afirm the V3 behaved better over the V5. I also probably have an old post or email here some where that explained why the V5 didn't give expected performance boost of V3/V4 because of memory speed/bandwidth/architecture  issues. Darn head cold is making me to lazy to go through the ancient files though.

I think the V4 was supposed to be better, but I've not tried one myself.

As far as I know, I was also the only one to get an S3Virge DX card to work at all. It was recognised and I could get it to do test patterns through the config util, but the system would hang immediately after that.


Plaz

[matthey]

I have been using a Voodoo4 and it's been working identical to the Voodoo3 right down to the Mediator driver bugs . My tests show it to be nearly the same speed as the Voodoo3. The advantage is twice the gfx memory, a little sharper image quality, and a few more display modes. I'm going to try and get the large texture support for Voodoo4+ (greater than 256x256) going in Warp3D as well as more bug fixes and speed-ups.

[KThunder]

the voodoo5 was designed more for the agp interface and around hardware t&l software- directx 7 iirc. on a pci bus with non t&l software the 5 would only be a bit faster due to faster core and mem. the additional features would be unused.

so t&l, multitexture, pixel pipe optimizing (slightly different on the 5), and antialiasing (i think) would all go unused.

[matthey]

@KThunder
The VSA-100 (Voodoo 4 and 5) didn't have t&l. It was full featured besides that for the time. You may be correct about the bus being optimized for AGP instead of PCI like the Voodoo 3. The memory speed was also faster in many cases on the Voodoo 3. My Voodoo 3 overclocks a lot more than my Voodoo 4.

[KThunder]

yep you are right the voodoo5 has no hardware t&l. i read your post and though "thats not right" so i looked it up, it has software t&l. the only voodoo5 ive ever seen i saw running a game thats needed hardware t&l was using a program called 3danalyze which is a sort of hwt&l emulator. it makes programs that require hwt&l think that it is there while running it in software.
ive had a couple of voodoo3s so i have a little more experience with them.

[flaviosr]

I have found out which is the problem!!! ((
I wrote an email to Elbox and this is the answer:
"
  This is a problem of noise on the A1200 reset signal.

  Voodoo 5 should always start with ProductID: 9.
  Sometimes it starts with ProductID: 7, which is not correct.

  This problem has been solved in the SX and TX models, where
  we have added buffering of the A1200 reset signal.
"
Anybody have an idea on what I could do (without changing the busboard)?