The 3dfx Voodoo 5 5500 AGP
An "In House" PREview and Test Of Alpha 2 Product

By Dave "Davo" Altavilla
4/24/00

Voodoo5 5500 Installation / Setup
Easy and full of toys
 
We won't go into a full blown discussion in this section since after all, these are beta drivers and software that we were working with and they could very well change significantly before the release date.  However, we can tell you that the installation was uneventful (just the way we like it) and the card was up and running in a matter of minutes.  Here are a couple of screen shots of the driver control panels.

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To say the Voodoo5 Driver Suite is full featured would be an understatement.  I especially like the ability to adjust Gamma settings for Desktop, D3D, Glide/OpenGL and Video Overlay, totally independent of each other.  Also, as you will note in the top right pic, Texture Compression can be toggled on or off.  For the tests in this review, the drivers sent to us were set to be always on.  This made no difference as far as our eyes could perceive with respect to game image quality.  More on this later.

Yes, boys and girls, you can overclock the Voodoo5 5500.  As you can see, indeed the core clock is set to 166 and it is synchronous with the memory clock.  We were able to overclock our board somewhat but we'll cover that later.

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Although our pre-release card did not come with a DVD player, we are sure there will be software included to play your favorite titles, when you want to relax after a hard battle in the arena.  So we tried our luck with Power DVD just to see how the Voodoo5 did in our reference system, a P3-866 w/ 128MB of RAM, with respect to the silver screen.

Hey man, look! Not only does Neo know Kung Fu but that punk's got Voodoo!

 

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