Price: $115+ street

Oh how the mighty have stumbled. The least capable card in this roundup is 3dfx's Voodoo4 4500. With fewer features and/or less speed than the other value boards, the Voodoo4 4500 shows just how easy it is to misjudge the competition when you are forecasting from two or three years out.

3dfx Voodoo4 4500 AGP

• 166MHz VSA-100 core
• 333 million pixels per second
• 333 million texels per second
• 32MB of 166MHz SDR SDRAM on 128-bit bus
• 2.7GBps theoretical peak memory bandwidth
• 350MHz RAMDAC supports up to 2048x1536x32bppx75MHz
• AGP 2x/4X support with fast writes

The Voodoo4 4500 uses the 166MHz VSA-100 graphics processor matched to 32MB of 166MHz SDRAM. While it has the same memory setup as most of the competition, it just cannot keep up with its less powerful single VSA-100 processor, which seems intended to run in groups. The only card in its 3D speed league is the G450, but the G450 has a superior feature set. On the software side, the Voodoo4 comes with 3Deep and a coupon for DVD playback software. The card has one saving grace, it supports Glide, and so the card is well suited to the few remaining games that support Glide better than OpenGL and DirectX.