3dfx Voodoo 5 5500 PCI

With the arrival of the PCI Voodoo5 5500, new life can be brought to aging systems. If you are running on a higher end CPU, such as a Pentium III 550E or above, and are limited to a PCI video card, the Voodoo5 5500 is a blessing. No longer must you suffer through slow games due to the lack of a good PCI video card.

In older systems, with lower-end CPUs, the Voodoo5 5500 can only do so much before it is limited by the slow speed of the CPU. As our Celeron 433 tests showed, the card is not strikingly faster than the old (and inexpensive) Voodoo3 3000. With the CPU acting as such a bottleneck, it seems like the best idea would to be to upgrade the CPU now and get a faster video card later, when the system can actually take advantage of it.

One nice aspect of running the Voodoo5 5500 in a lower end system is the fact that enabling FSAA will result in almost no performance loss. Since the video card is not able to use all its power with FSAA off in an older system due to a CPU limitation, enabling FSAA is really the only way to get the full power out of the Voodoo5 5500 PCI in an older system. The frame rate may be as low as before you upgraded to the $300 card, but the image quality will be much better.

The Voodoo5 5500 is a blessing for many users out there with higher end CPUs on an i810 motherboard. For others with lower end processors, the Voodoo5 5500 really only makes sense if FSAA is desired. Otherwise, stick with your current video card (or perhaps upgrade to a Voodoo3 3000) and look for a CPU upgrade first. With a fast PCI video card option finally out. 3dfx will win a place in even more systems.