Rare 3DFX Voodoo 5 graphics card sold for $15K
A graphics card that was never to be released has shown up as a prototype on eBay.
The 3DFX Voodoo5 graphics card was never released as a retail product, but the company made several prototypes that are now occasionally seen on auction sites. If not for the bugs and delays that halted the production of this video card, it might have been a game changer for the company that has later to be acquired by NVIDIA.
The Voodoo 5 6000 is a single-slot graphics card with four VSA-100 (Napalm 30) graphics processors. Each of the GPUs had 14 million transistors, so with four of them this would have been one of the most advanced GPU at the time. In fact, if not of the bugs that prevented the GPU to work in AGP 4x mode required by Intel Pentium GPUs, this card would likely outperform GeForce 2 GTS/Ultra and Radeon 7500. Not only that, it had 128MB VRAM which was the highest memory capacity for any consumer GPU at the time.
3DFX Voodoo 5 6000 prototype, Source: eBay
The card now sold through eBay is a prototype labeled 3700A. It was reworked by 3dfx engineer Hank Semenc to support full stable 8X FSAA and had many of the known bugs fixed, claims the seller.
With 65 bids, the final price for this prototype is 15,000 USD. This is exactly 50 times more than Voodoo 5 5500 GPU at launch (June 2000).
Source: ebay
