Once this was the top of the line graphics card from 3dfx! The 3dfx Voodoo5 5500 AGP with 64MB SDR-SDRAM and two VSA-100 chips. Each chip has access to 32MB so the effective usage of RAM is about 32MB, not 64MB .

The VSA-100 chip features Anti-Aliasing (often abbreviated with AA) and because the Voodoo5 has two chips it was quite a good solution for AA back in the old days. AA is used to remove the 'jaggies' or otherwise said: ugly pixels on edges of objects.

The Voodoo5 5500 is the perfect example of how SLI on an AGP card should work. ATi had the Rage 128 Pro MAXX edition but the card only works in single-chip modus on Windows 2000 and XP systems due to a design error. The VolariDUO V8 Ultra had a way to narrow 'BitFluent' bus between the two chips. It only featured 2,1GB/s which is probably too small. It was not until PCI-Express came before good SLI implementations arrived. The AGP bus was actually not suitable for dual chip design as it could only address one chip. This means there has to be a master chip and a slave chip: that's where bottlenecks are created.

As benchmarks turn out the SLI implementation on the Voodoo5 makes the two VSA-100 chips move in to the fast lane! > Read more

The PCI version of the Voodoo5 5500. In a regular PCI slot it's probably a tad but thanks to the 66MHz PCI interface on the card it can be run in faster PCI slots as well. Remember that a 66MHz PCI slot is just as fast as an AGP 2x slot.

Besides the PCI slot there is not much difference between the PCI and AGP card. The PCI card features traces for a DVI connector because the Mac versions of these boards had a DVI connector installed. The Mac versions are pretty much the same as the PC versions except for the BIOS and one resister. The Mac card can be flashed with a PC-card BIOS and will run fine in a PC afterwards. The PC version can not be flashed for Mac due to a blocking resister on the board itself. 3dfx installed the resister to prevent people buying the cheap PC cards and use them in a Mac. Don't forget that the 5500PCI was the most powerful 3D card you could get for a Mac system at the time! > Read more

An old production Voodoo5 5500. Most of these cards have a PCB date of 0021 instead of 0019 (week 19 of 2000). Because of this date difference I bought this card.

When I received the card I noticed a capacitor fell off but the damage could be repaired. See this topic on the forum for information about it. The second picture also shows the repaired capacitor. > Read more