Rare 3dfx Voodoo 5 6000 card currently auctions for US$14,100 on Ebay

Back in the year 2000, the gaming GPU market was not dominated by just two companies like today. Nvidia had to confront not only ATI (later becomes AMD’s GPU division) with its newly introduced Radeon cards, but also 3dfx with the new Voodoo 4500 and 5500 cards, Matrox with the G450, S3 with Savage 2000 or even the infamous BitBoys Oy with the Glaze3D vaporware. The competition was tougher, and consumers could find solutions for any budget thanks to constant price wars. Unfortunately, 3dfx was one of the companies that could not adapt to the highly competitive market conditions, so it ultimately got bought out by Nvidia. Apart from its Voodoo 5 5500 cards with dual GPUs, 3dfx was also planning to release Voodoo 6 6000 cards with four GPUs, but this never came to happen before the buyout. Only around 1,000 prototype units were pre-produced for the unreleased model, and one of these is now up for auction on Ebay.

The auction started at US$0.01 on February 2 and it is now at US$14,100 with 4 days still remaining. The seller claims this is a very rare revision 3700A prototype that was reworked by 3dfx engineer Hank Semenec to support stable FSAA X8. Moreover, this particular card comes from a later development batch that has most of the bugs ironed out.

3dfx is known for introducing the SLI technology, and the Voodoo 5 cards were notorious back in the day because they included more than one GPU on the same board. As such, the cards were longer, and the Voodoo 5 6000 were even more so with the GPUs grouped next to each other. On the upper side of the GPUs, the card features eight memory chips for a total of 128 MB of VRAM. Of course the power requirements were well beyond what the AGP slot could offer, so 3dfx planned to include a separate power supply. In this regard, the card on auction comes with a “Voodoo volts” molex adapter so the card can connect directly to a PC PSU.

For most 3dfx fans and enthusiasts, this model could be considered as the holy grail, given the relatively small production run for the prototype stage. The current bid may give a rough estimate for the value, but it will be interesting to see if the bid war could push the value to over US$20,000 in the remaining days.

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