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Sharky Extreme : December 3, 2008





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The 3000 ONLY comes in the AGP flavor, so if for some strange reason you're looking to fill an PCI slot then look elsewhere to the Voodoo3 2000. The layout of an STB Velocity 4400 board resembles the Voodoo3 3000 (and indeed 2000). Except… there's a bloody great, huge, massive, heat sink (well as the picture of the board shows, it's BIG). As bizarre as the heat sink looks, it seems to do the job it's meant to do adequately. That is to say we never experienced any lock ups whatsoever during the three day benchmarking period (no Easter bunnies for us folks). Another plus point of a heat sink as opposed to an on-board fan, is that there's no extra noise generated.

With then Voodoo3 3000's graphics clock set to 166Mhz and the eight on-board SDRAM memory chips set to 166MHz also, the board's theoretical maximum fill rate is 166Megapixels/333MegaTexels per second (a 'Texel' refers to a bilinear textured pixel) with a 6 million polygon/second throughput. Obviously with the clock speed being set to 166MHz, as opposed to 143Mhz for the 2000, the fill rate is still somewhat greater as is the resultant performance (see benchmark graphs). Then again for a 'low-end' and low-cost solution, the Voodoo3 2000 still boasts a fill rate performance way in excess of a single Voodoo2 or Voodoo Banshee (it's predecessor). The 3000's extra cost is tempered by the fact that it also comes with a 350MHz RAMDAC, which is slightly faster than the 300MHz found on the 2000. The 2D performance as a result is the best yet seen.

Voodoo3 - 3500 		366Mtexels/s
Voodoo3 - 3000 	 	333Mtexels/s
Voodoo3 - 2000 	 	286Mtexels/s
Voodoo2 SLI 	 	360Mtexels/s
Voodoo2 	 	180Mtexels/s
Banshee 	 	100Mtexels/s 






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