3Dfx is nowadays just a part of history, although a very important part. It started the era of 3D graphics card in the 1990s, but sadly it all came to an end in 2002. The company and all resources were acquired by NVIDIA and even though 3Dfx’ SLI technology isn’t closely related to NVIDIA’s SLI technology they appear to be very similar. The last cards from 3Dfx where the 3Dfx Voodoo 5 series where the top model Voodoo 5 5500 had two VSA-100 GPU and integrated SLI.
It wasn’t enough to keep 3Dfx alive though, it was terribly late, and it all quickly came to an end. Still, 3Dfx is revered and it is always a pleasure to be reminded of the good ol’ days. Many have old Voodoo cards lying around and now and then one or two decide to bring them out.
Sentionline007 at PCGamesHardware decided to make something of his old Voodoo 5 5500. He removed the original cooling and slapped something bigger on it. He calls it “Extreme CoolMod”. It may not be the best looking or most practical cooling we’ve seen, but still pretty damn cool, in more than one way.
Stock cooling isn’t quite up to 2010 standards
The cooling increased the weight of the card to 1.5 kg and the circuits are kept at room temperature, more or less, after some lapping and two powerful fans running at maximum speed.
From a historic point of view this almost counts as heresy and desecration of a priceless artifact, but then again it’s still high-end hardware meant to be pushed to the limits of our imagination.
But can it run Crysis?