In order to review this Voodoo 5 6000, we had to find the right motherboard that could support the card's PCI-PCI bridge ( HiNT chip). A motherboard known to be compatible is the Gigabyte GA-7VRX built around a VIA KT333 chipset. This configuration is equiped with an Athlon XP 2800+ and 512MB of DDR PC3200 Apacer CL2 RAM. This computer has a processing power of about 3 times what was available when the Voodoo 5 series were released in 2000. This should guarantee that the graphic card performance  isn't limited by the CPU power.

 

 

As another test card we used a GeForce2 Ultra built by Elsa which has probably been the most expensive graphic card ever released on the mass market (around 650 euros). This card has an  AGP 4x slot and 64MB of memory. It's core is clocked at 250MHz and the memory at 230MHz.

 

 

We will also compare our Voodoo 5 6000 to a Voodoo 4 4500 with only one VSA-100 and 32MB RAM and to a Voodoo 5 5500 equiped with 2 VSA-100 and 64MB RAM to see what adding GPUs brings. All VSA-100 chips are clocked at the same166MHz frequency.

 

 

 

To summarize, the test computer is:

Hardware :

* Gigabyte GA-7VRX rev. 2.0 w/ F8B BIOS
* AMD Athlon XP 2800+ (Barton 512kB, FSB266)
* 512MB RAM PC3200 Apacer CL2 (used in PC2100 mode)
* 40Go IBM 7200tr/min HDD / UDMA 5
* nVidia GeForce 2 Ultra, 3dfx Voodoo 4 4500, 3dfx Voodoo 5 5500, 3dfx Voodoo 5 6000
* Enermax 365W PSU

 

 

Software:

* Windows XP Pro Service pack 2 Fr
* VIA Hyperion 455vp1
* ForceWare 71.84, Amigamerlin 3.1 R6 + MesaFX 6.2.0.2
* 3DMark2001 SE build 330
* Quake 3 Arena 1.32
* Doom 3 1.1