Currently on eBay, we find a graphics card whose bids are over $12000! But what model is it? It is simply a prototype of Voodoo 5 6000 3700A. At the moment, to bid on it, you’ll have to put at least $12200 on it!
More than $12000 for a 3DFX Voodoo 5 6000 at auction!
For those who remember, 3DFX was a leading graphics card manufacturer in the 90s. The company produced a number of models and developed technologies used until not so long ago, remembering SLI in particular.
Anyway, the model that interests us now is a prototype of a card that will not have had time to see the day. However, you should know that it has a total of four VS-100 GPUs running at 166 MHz. Moreover, these chips were engraved in 250 nm, which seems quite big compared to the current GPUs in 5 nm… But remember that this particular model was produced in the 2000s.
To say a little more about the specs, we will also remember the presence of SDRAM memory chip up to 128 MB in total … or 32 MB per GPU. Ditto, the memory also worked at 166 MHz, which allows a bandwidth of 2.656 GB/s.
In terms of display, we find support for a maximum resolution of 1366×768. The power supply goes through an external adapter “Voodoo Volts”, which will have been cobbled in Molex for the occasion. Similarly, in the announcement, we learn that the engineer Hank Semenec has put his hands in it. The goal is to correct the problems related to the anti-aliasing FSAAx8 which seems perfectly stable according to the announcement. Indeed, these cards were victims of a bug in the PCI system linking the different GPUs. The latter caused instabilities at high load.
In short, to get this Holy Grail, you should not hesitate to put your hand in the wallet, $12200… Currently. For the moment, the auction ends in 6 days, so it remains to be seen what price this model will reach by then!
