VooDoo strikes me again
Written: Feb 21 '01
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Great color, very fast, relatively cheap
Cons: not a 64 MB card
The Bottom Line: An excellent performing card. In my opinion it outperforms most of the other 32 MB cards out there.
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| firehawk_71's Full Review: 3dfx Voodoo4 4500 |
I really really liked my VooDoo 3 so I decided to upgrade to the 4. The first thing I noticed when I popped in this bad boy was how fast everything ran, the speed at which games ran was even faster. I did notice however that in-game movies were not quite as clear as they were with the VooDoo 3 but this could be do to the settings I currently have on the card. (the 3dfx tools software which comes with the card has a very wide array of settings for everything that the card does. It has settings for openGL, glide, anti-aliasing, AGP mode, just about anything you can think of that you would want to change settings on how it performs.)
I have the AGP version, it is also available in PCI. The AGP is capable up to x4. AGP runs faster than the PCI version but I believe that PCI has a higher quality picture in some areas, such as the in-game movies I spoke of earlier. I would have to compare the PCI and AGP versions of the VooDoo 4 side by side to be sure though.
The VooDoo 4 has 32 MB of memory, a VSA-100 chip which has a 166Mhz clock speed to provide ultra fast video capabilities. You know this video card is a bad boy cause it has its own fan on the graphics chip, we are talking power here.
I have also compared the VooDoo 4 to the VooDoo 5 since one of my friends has the 5. The 5 has 64 MB of memory and two VSA-100 chips on it with dual fans, you would think this would make it twice the video card that the VooDoo 4 is but in all reality there was not much difference between the two. The 5 was faster, but not much faster. The current retail values are $200 for the VooDoo 5 and $150 for the VooDoo 4, although you can find them cheaper online (check out www.pricewatch.com) if you are willing to shell out the extra cash for the 5 I say the 4 is good enough for any gamer's needs for the time being. I have had no problems running the newest games out there.
An added bonus to the VooDoo 4 (and the 5) is that it was made to work extremely well with a DVD rom (especially for movie playing) and it comes with download instructions for DVD software if you don't have any. Many games are going to be coming out which will be on DVD, this is due to the fact that you can fit way more on a DVD than you can on a CD, so games on DVD will run well with the VooDoo 4.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 130
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Epinions.com ID:
firehawk_71
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Member: Ryan Griffith
Location: Spokane, Washington
Reviews written: 45
Trusted by: 24 members
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