Has anyone dealt with using Voodoo hardware in a Socket 3 motherboard w/ 486 before?
I'd like to know experiences of others beforehand first

should work as long as the motherboard has pci slots (obviously).cards up to voodoo3 have been tested successfully,the performance was just enough to play UT at its lowest settings.voodoo2/banshee were the best performers,if memory serves.

I tried running a Voodoo Graphics board a very long time ago in a 486 with PCI slots, it would crash the machine on drive load and I would have to wipe the hard drive and reload the OS. I never did get it to work and 3dfx documents indicate a pentium is the minimum platform required.

This was a very long time ago, long before I started collecting, I don't remember any more details aside from it was a Digital office machines desktop.

Just out of morbid curiosity, I dug out my old Socket 3 486 AMD 5x86 133 mhz computer and decided to try to get a voodoo card to work in it.  I first tried a voodoo rush, but that wouldn't load after driver install.  Second thing I tried was a Diamond PCI Monster Fusion (Banshee) and they wouldn't even post.   Finally, I just stuck in a Voodoo 1 along side the S3 main video and the drivers installed fine on Windows ME.  The reboot went fine.  I fired up NFSII SE and it ran sort of OK with all detail turned down.  I also tried Test Drive 4, but that bogged the system down to a crawl.  

The conclusion I draw from this is that it is certainly possible to get a voodoo card running on a 486 type system.  The CPU I have hardly qualifies as a true 486 processor.  It is actually rated as a Pentium 75.  If I really wanted to give myself a good laugh, I would drop in my 486DX 33mhz cpu and play NFS2 SE in slow motion  :o

sigtau wrote on 28.06.08 at 19:32:11:

Just out of morbid curiosity, I dug out my old Socket 3 486 AMD 5x86 133 mhz computer and decided to try to get a voodoo card to work in it.  I first tried a voodoo rush, but that wouldn't load after driver install.  Second thing I tried was a Diamond PCI Monster Fusion (Banshee) and they wouldn't even post.   Finally, I just stuck in a Voodoo 1 along side the S3 main video and the drivers installed fine on Windows ME.  The reboot went fine.  I fired up NFSII SE and it ran sort of OK with all detail turned down.  I also tried Test Drive 4, but that bogged the system down to a crawl.

heh interesting, because that's the processor I have! I also have a 486 DX4 100 to try out as well.


gdonovan wrote on 28.06.08 at 10:47:51:

I tried running a Voodoo Graphics board a very long time ago in a 486 with PCI slots, it would crash the machine on drive load and I would have to wipe the hard drive and reload the OS. I never did get it to work and 3dfx documents indicate a pentium is the minimum platform required.

woah that's over the top with problems.  A CPU heat freeze was the only thing that happened to me to break my OS severely, I doubt a PCI video card would be a culprit

fyi i'm going to use a voodoo2, and attempt to play games like Sauerbraten :P

Soon as I would load the drivers it would freeze or freeze on the reboot and I could get no further.

Perhaps it's just sucking a lot of juice. I'm using a 230W PSU

230W is more than enough.

I've seen (and played on) a Cyrix 486DX4/100 with Diamond Voodoo II. Half-Life did run but with 0,05FPS or something like that :P.

WHOA! :o

@レイレイ - you're going to try and play sauerbraten on a Voodoo card, ON A 486!!! :o

Dies ist Ihre boomstick! 8-)

http://sauerbraten.org/

Although I had a P1-133 with my Diamond Monster Voodoo 1 card. My nephew only had a 486 DX 66MHz and He and I used to play Co-op Descent2 with the d2voodoo patch together. No issues other than his would chop like a slide show during heavy battle.

If we were in the same room (in the game), the game would slow down on my machine. We also played GLQuake.

paulpsomiadis wrote on 29.06.08 at 00:30:21:

you're going to try and play sauerbraten on a Voodoo card, ON A 486!!! :o

i've played it on worse (Cyrix6x86mx @ 80mhz)
http://openarena.ws/crap/sauervoodoo2.png

Holy !!! the card is working!
Games tested so far:
Unreal - 4fps
Metal Gear Solid - 5fps

I think my old sound card may be bottlenecking the entire computer because it's making doom run slow too :(, could swap it with an AWE32...
It could be the third party driver i'm using as well (FastVoodoo2 4.6), is it better to use the reference driver? The third party ones could have some overhead for modern processor support and features I think that the 486 doesn't need to compute with

You can always give the old reference drivers a shot :). On my Athlon 500 I noticed the new thirdparty drivers (with Voodoo5 though) were a lot slower comparing to the latest 3dfx reference drivers. The 3dfx reference drivers did not only work better performance wise, Soldiers of Fortune ran better with them too (texture corruption during start up of the game with the third party driver).

I've switched to the latest official driver, changed ram timing from 3-2-3 to 2-1-2, set read wait state to 0 and pciclk to 4, unreal now runs 10fps and mgs runs 7ish. GLQuake's getting 30fps :O!

LOL! but GLQuake runs fast on most GL based hardware! ;D

Even on older SGI machines that had VERY little GFX RAM. ;)

(of course that was the IRIX port of GLQuake) ::)

I have an AMD 486DX4 120MHz lying around. Is anyone interested?

Is that a real one or is it just the 5x86 133 without the 4x multiplier set (which then identifies as an AMD 486DX4 120)? Photo of CPU please.

Jesus it is no fake, I will make a scan soon for you ok?

I just took this photograph :)

http://freenet-homepage.de/Kaitou/AMDDX4120.jpg

No one interested?

no

I wish dx8/9 could install on 486, it always refuses to :(

Latest DX 9.0c installers refuse to work even on Pentium class CPU. ::)

M$ are getting more CR@PPY with their installers... >:(

actually,the 2008 releases refuse to install on athlonxp based systems as well,it seems.