i bought a Voodoo 5 5500AGP on Ebay recently, waiting for it in the mail.

i have some questions:

1- What kind of PC would work the best with it?
2- Which 3rd-party drivers are the best for it?
3- If i have to change fan(s) on it, are they easy to replace? are they 40mm x 10mm thick fans?

As for the PC, the best P3 i have here is a Pentium 3 800Mhz, slot-1, with 1gb of SDRAM, FSB of 100Mhz, with a SB Live. It currently have a Voodoo 3 3000 AGP, so i would have to uninstall the drivers before switching card.

no one answered yet? i'm surprised...

Well, you do post a lotta different questions. Hahaha

If you read through the forum, alll those answers are easy to find, but to make it easier:

1: that P3 pc is just fine, but fastest for it would be an XP3000 on a KT333 board
2: sfft, amigamerlin are both fine, but 3dfx own drivers are fine as well
3: I wouldn't do that, just add small heatsinks to the back of the pcb where the gpu's are.

i mean i'm pretty sure the fans will get, or are already, noisy. Though i don't want to pop off the heatsinks, i don't plan on overclocking it at all, i don't want to risk ruining such a great card!
I just wish i could change the fans in case they get noisy, so i would need to know which size i would need. I do have a Scythe Mini-Kaze here i would probably plug on the power supply Molex connector, though i only have 1, not 2, so this is why i would need to know the fan size if i'm going to replace it (they're probably only screwed on the heatsink, like most CPU fans of the time. Are they 40mm fans?

This Scythe Mini-Kaze i have here is a good silent small fan, 40x40x10mm, 3500rpm, 14dba, 4.11 cfm, sleeve bearing. Are the AAVID fans 40mm? maybe thicker than 10mm?

I think those fans are 40x40mm, thickness I do not know, but doesn't really matter in my opinion.

I would wait for your card, clean the fans when you get it and then turn it on.

my 5500AGP is still as silent as the night so to speak.

i wonder if those fans are controlled by the card, kinda like today, when the card get hotter, it spin faster. or always at 12V speed?

I mean...the fans seem to have 3 wires, so Ground, 5V and 12V i believe.

No fan speed control, always max speed. The original fans are 5V only and thats what the card gives.

red -> 5v
black -> ground
blue -> signal (not used)

ah so they're not supposed to be very loud.

The original AAVIDs are getting loud because of the bad ball-bearing quality and lube that is used. If the ball-bearing is still fine they are pretty quiet, at least in my opinion ;)

It depends on how long the V5 was used before. The fans might be still fine.

i sent a message to the guy and he said they're still fine.

Now i found a slightly faster board with 133Mhz FSB and a P3 866Mhz Socket370 CPU, i used this on an Asus S370 to Socket-1 adapter and it work!

The Board is a MSI, MicroATX form factor, the AGP slot is keyed for older AGP 1x/2x cards, it only have 2 slots for RAM, but i should have more than enough with 2x 256mb PC133. disabled the built-in audio and using a SB Live! value in it.

The case i found come from a Fujitsu Siemens Scaleo computer, it's a pretty standard one, no screwed up parts like in those HP computers.

The case look like this:
http://www.digi-shop.it/106-262-thickbox/fujitsu-siemens-scaleo.jpg

I tested the AGP slot with an AGP 1x/2x card such as an ATI Rage 128 GL (only 1 key on it which is the 3.3v one) and it seem to work just fine. I didn't installed the drivers for it though, i just wanted to install everything except the video card driver so it'll be ready when i'll get my V5500 in the mail.

I just need to use a more quality power supply in it, because it's going to have the V5500 inside, so i want better power to go thru it.

Hey hey, a case from my old company  8-) I like it because of the clean front.

If you don't like the Fujitsu Siemens badge you could replace it with a bigger 3dfx dome sticker.

What powersupply is build in the system?

i've put in a "Power Man" 300W power supply instead of the cheaper-looking 420W. The Power Man one feel heavier and have more connectors to it, ATX power connector is longer, so it's most probably a real 300W, while the cheaper 420W have a lot less connectors, feel kinda light and the ATX power connector is a bit shorter.

i can't find a 3DFX case badge, it seem to be a real pain to find. It would be nice to have. Though i may, at some point, paint the metal parts (side doors and top) of the case, since there's a spray paint that almost have the same color as the front bezel, sold at the hardware store nearby, it's the Krylon's "Navy" color.

Actually i'm a bit surprised the P3 866 S370 worked on the Socket-1 adapter, since all the Asus boards i have here, the CPU support for those adapters stop at 700Mhz i believe, but i'm glad it does work, and on a MSI board!

If you want, I have an MSI 694D Pro dual socket 370 board with 2 x P31Ghz and 2GB ram.

Can let you have it for a very nice price.

i'll be tight on money this month, i'll be buying like 75 old PC games all in their box, most of those games date from 2003 and older i believe, many of them in old style oversized boxes, 80$ for the lot. So...yeah. Though i wish i had 2x P3 1Ghz Slot-1 with 100Mhz FSB though, since i do have an Asus P2B-DS dual Slot-1 board, and supposed to support up to P3 1Ghz CPUs. But the thing is Win98 doesn't detect 2 CPUs

it's true win98se doesn't see 2 cpu's, but I'm using the system as a dualboot, will be installing win2k also, for benching purposes, to see what the performance difference will be between 98SE en win2k.

And I wanna include it in my domain at home, and the forest functional level is too high for me to join it with win98se. :)

lately i replaced the Power Man 300W for an Enermax 350W with 2 fans (bottom and exhaust), and replaced the P4 1.7Ghz with 256kb de L2 cache (Willamette) for a P4 1.6Ghz with 512kb of L2 cache. (Northwood).

i formatted again and re-installed everything correctly before installing video drivers, including the Via 4-in-1 drivers which improve the AGP and IDE speed a lot (i noticed a very big speed difference in the loadings of Windows and games)

Also, in the 3DFX settings, i switched the AGP speed from 1x to 2x, i don't know why it default to 1x...maybe for compatibility purpose if the board is only AGP 1x?

well i think this is nice now.

i remember buying a 19inch 16:9 monitor in a garage sale a month or so ago, for 10$, it's an Emachines E180HV, resolution is 1366x768, but it have a nice option in the screen to choose "forced widescreen" or "proportional" meaning if your Windows support only 5:4 or 4:3, it will go in this proportion, meaning it'll have vertical black bars on each side, but i don't really care, as i bought this screen especially for old PCs setup, and it have only a VGA connector on it, so i figured they might have optimized the VGA output a lot for a LCD monitor which doesn't have DVI on it.

So i plugged this monitor on my V5500, and it look nice so far, since the vertical resolution is 768, the screen isn't blurry in 1024x768, and i think this resolution is the best for Glide games.

RaptorZX3 wrote on 08.09.13 at 16:59:53:

Also, in the 3DFX settings, i switched the AGP speed from 1x to 2x, i don't know why it default to 1x...maybe for compatibility purpose if the board is only AGP 1x?

All V5 are only capable of AGP 1x, because the SLI between both VSA100 works with PCI66 (PCI @ 66MHz) protocol. So no advanced AGP and bus speed is only 66MHz (which is AGP1x).

ah i see...so if i even switch AGP to 1x in the BIOS, performance will be the same?

That's the case, yes  :)

which heatsink-fans would you recommend me when will come the time to replace those heatsinks on my V5500?

i heard of a particular model, but i can't find a place with a cheap price...and low shipping.