Hello all the cards aka the Voodoo5 5000 AGP Rev.A0 3700 and Voodoo5 5500 AGP Rev.A1 3300 and Rev.A2 3300 and Voodoo5 5500 AGP + DVI Rev.A2 3300 all have AGP x4 connectors

And yes they all work on AGP x2 Bus speeds and need a 3.3Volt AGP volatage.

But back to thier AGP x4 connectors why didn't make them AGP x4 in the first place, wouldn't that work because of the SLi or was AGP x4 not possible ?

and Why didn't 3dfx make an AGP x4 model of the Voodoo5 6000 is that because of the Sli problem for 4 chips or would that of been another reason?

But Is there more technical info about these small Voodoo5 cards?

Thanx for reading :)

Cheers,

Obi-Wan Kenobi.

Obi wan my understanding from what information i have gathered on this subject is....

The Voodoo5 5500 AGP will only operate at the 1x (66MHz) transfer rate, although the 2x transfer is selectable in '3dfx tools' it actually doesn't work. The motherboard will automatically default back to PCI66 mode but the 3dfx tools option will remain at 2x.

The reason the Voodoo5 cards will not operate at 2X AGP is because the AGP interface requires an AGP Master Chip. Because the board is dual-chipped, it cannot assign a master chip, and so defaults into AGP 1X (really PCI66 mode). Thus the Voodoo5 5500 AGP will only run at the 1x transfer rate which is not really AGP but 'double speed PCI'. The way to overcome this would have been to include an AGP bridge controller chip onboard, like the Voodoo5 6000.

There are rare Voodoo5 5000/5500 engineering samples which are mounted on a 1.5V/3.3V AGP Universal 2.0 PCB. This does not mean the card will run in 2x or 4x AGP, it will not, the card will install in some newer AGP 2.0/AGP 3.0 motherboards, which is the only advantage, but will still operate as a PCI66 device. There is nothing that can be done about this.

As to the agp x4 v5 6k im not sure why but it might be a power issue?  ;)

The reson is simple.

The slave chips have bus snooping mechnism that works on PCI signaling only. The slave watches the pci bus transactions and never repplies to them. That is how the command data is sent to all the slave VSA100 chips.

There are exceptions, the slave chips can be individually accessed by their dedicated address regions. This is for setup. The addresses are hidden from OS and only driver and BIOS sets them up.

PCI is required in SLI. AGP has PCI only subset at 66MHz.

Hank

hmm thanx Hank but would a 5000 or 5500 PCI run 66Mhz in a 64 Bit 66Mhz PCI-X slot?

Or would they still runn 33Mhz since that 32Bit PCI only supports 33Mhz unless it does also supprt 66Mhz that would change the issue?

The real question is can you mod a 4x/8x AGP slot to accept a VooDoo 5500 and have it work w/o killing anything  ;)

Quote:

There are exceptions, the slave chips can be individually accessed by their dedicated address regions. This is for setup. The addresses are hidden from OS and only driver and BIOS sets them up.

Sounds a lot like how the dual monitor stuff would work on the V5's :D

wrote on 14.01.06 at 05:43:41:

The real question is can you mod a 4x/8x AGP slot to accept a VooDoo 5500 and have it work w/o killing anything  ;)

yes,this has been done before,one guy (from forum.3dfx.cz) has modded an agp 8x/4x slot on a nforce2 based mobo and tried a voodoo5 5500agp in it.the card worked perfectly in single chip mode,but was very unstable when running both chips in SLI.increasing the agp voltage has helped,but the card has died after few days anyway :(..let us just wait for that agp2pci adaptor.thats the only safe way ;)

hehe yeah I can't till that day comes I really hope that will be a possibillity this year :)

May The Force Be With You ps47, it still sounds like a dream come true, soon we will have our own AGP2PCI adapter well 3 of them wouldn't be prob for me :) one for each PC ;D\

so basicly is that because the slave chips only can opperate in PCI mode for SLI that AGP was out of the question so this would mean that a 66Mhz PCI-X slot wouldn't make things brighter I suppose, because that slot would run like an AGP x2 slot?

hmm then I question myself, why did 3dfx create AGP x4 vor de 5000 and 5500 only? if SLI needed PCI bus what's the use of an AGP x4 connector is the first place?

hehe still odd :)

wrote on 14.01.06 at 05:43:41:

The real question is can you mod a 4x/8x AGP slot to accept a VooDoo 5500 and have it work w/o killing anything  ;)

Already covered on another board- The short answer is no due to the location of some circuit paths.