Bigeye #13: Athlon + Voodoo3

Created on May 30, 2020
Indexed on September 02, 2022 at 05:11 PM

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While this computer doesn't have the exact same specs it did back then, I can tell you this thing held out a long time, back when my family used it every day from 2000 to 2005. Even when it was bogged down by a lot of things in its later years, it was still usable.

The Athlon was a turning point for AMD. They now had a CPU that could fight the Pentium III head on, rather than being that one option for the budget-conscious system builder. It's argued to be even faster than the Pentium III clock-for-clock in a number of cases.

Still, it had yet to run on a chipset with a competent AGP implementation. Not to worry, for 3dfx made AGP cards which didn't actually utilize any AGP features. Is that disadvantageous? Nope! The Voodoo3 is still very fast at high resolutions, and is optimal for many non-Intel chipsets.

This special model of the Voodoo3 includes a TV tuner and a strange video connector that connects to a breakout adapter, providing VGA, composite, and S-Video output. Of course, it's more sought after for its higher graphics clock over other Voodoo3 models.

I do not have the breakout adapter, but a generic Monoprice adapter of some kind can work if you bend the connector shielding outward. Or, if you're really lucky, you may be able to find a much more scarce equivalent of this card that just has the VGA connector.

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I had a "modern Athlon" 3000G which is basically the bottom of binned Ryzens as a replacement for my pin-broken Ryzen 3 2200G as I had nothing but some lucky money packages from relatives. Since then it has been doing really good especially after swiching to Fedora Linux.

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