Hi,

If you put a V5 5500 PCI in a PCI-X slot it will be more fast than in a PCI simple slot.

Better to use the PCI-X slot.

Trevor.

ultima wrote on 25.11.13 at 19:40:48:


Ok so we will know if it's right. Good Benchmarks. I will follow you here.

ultima wrote on 25.11.13 at 22:50:24:


1: Indeed, all 3dfx AGP adaptors are basically PCI adaptors simply "ported" on the AGP bus. They don't support typical features introduced with the AGP standard, like DIME, fast writes and sideband addressing, the latter except for Banshee and Voodoo3. AGP speeds are 2x max for Banshee/Voodoo3, 4x max for Voodoo4 and 1x for Voodoo5

2: Nope, all 3dfx AGP adaptors can do at least AGP 1x (66Mhz) which is double the PCI bus and that is that. The only improvements of the AGP over the PCI when it comes to 3dfx video cards are:
-Double bus bandwidth
-Dedicated bus, it does mean that no bandwidth is shared across other devices and it's all available to the VGA.

A Voodoo5 PCI should have exactly the same performances of the AGP one *if* you can run the card into a PCI-X slot, which is a PCI slot capable of 66MHz (PCI-X=AGP@1x).

So Voodoo5 PCI and AGP are basically the same thing. Point at issue is that as long as you can put the AGP one into the slot and get the card to work you'll run always the card at 66MHz bus clock. For the PCI version, in order to race against the AGP one, you have to choose the right slot, the one capable of 66MHz instead of classic 33MHz, which is the PCI-X slot as already stated.

In the end, if you don't notice any relevant difference between Voodoo5 AGP and PCI, even when the latter is using a PCI 33MHz slot only, is beacuse more likely the application doesn't require more bandwidth as much the 33MHz bus can offer.

Note- you will find a lot of performance difference running to 66MHz instead of 33MHz when a SW an application needs bandwidth. For example run a V5-5500 PCI 33MHz and later 66MHz using 3DMark2001SE where T&L is emulated by CPU. Here you will note an important improvement. Though using Quake3 timedemo the difference will be minimum.

- Oscar.

Voodoo5 PCI is a 32bit only device, you won't have any benefit using it into a 64bit capable slot.

What I meant to say was that your bandwidth is limited to 266MB/s MAX (66Mhz 32bit PCI = 66MHz x 32bit / 8), so is useless to consider 64bit in the math.

ultima wrote on 25.11.13 at 19:40:48:

In my benchmarks with a fast CPU (Pentium III 1400-S) I used a Voodoo 5 in a 33MHz PCI-slot and using lower resolutions the PCI-model is slower than the AGP version. With higher resolutions the differences between PCI and AGP get smaller eventually the difference is really small (for instance 0.30 FPS with Quake 3 at 1024x768 16-bit). With a slower CPU the difference between PCI and AGP is almost zero.