Graphics cards are more expensive than they used to be, but it turns out they can get even more expensive when they’re also a rare collectible. A late prototype of the unreleased Voodoo 5 6000, conceived as the flagship of the Voodoo 5 GPU family, sold for $15,000 on eBay this week, making the GeForce RTX 4090 look cheap by comparison.
The GPU is reported to be in “excellent condition”and appears to be fully functional – vendor gtastuntcrew302 posted a screenshot of the card scoring 6995 in 3DMark 2000 at 1024×768. These cards were never sold at retail, and only about 1000 prototypes were made, according to Piotr Gontarczyk’s Polish-language 3dfx history.
“This card has been personally re-engineered by renowned 3DFX engineer Hank Semenek for a fully stable 8X FSAA (I have personally verified that this card performs like a rock at 8X),”the seller wrote. “Unlike many other Voodoo 5 6000 prototypes, this one belongs to the later stages of the 6K prototype project, where the vast majority of bugs have been fixed.”
Based on the same VSA-100 architecture as the single GPU Voodoo 4 4500 and dual GPU Voodoo 5 5500, the 6000 includes a total of four VSA-100 chips with access to 32MB of RAM each. It might have outperformed today’s GeForce 2 and Radeon 7000 series GPUs, but each of those GPUs used a single chip, making them much easier to manufacture and cheaper to buy. The VSA-100 also lacked full support for the Direct3D 7 and Direct3D 8 graphics APIs that Nvidia and ATI GPUs supported at the time.
Early prototypes also had data corruption bugs that limited them to AGP 2x speed, although the prototype on this eBay list appears to have fixed those bugs. The retail version of the card would have required an external power supply because it required more power than the AGP graphics slot could provide, which was rare at the time, although virtually all modern GPUs require additional power through some sort of internal connector. The prototype receives additional power from an internal 4-pin Molex connector, which at the time was commonly used for hard drives, optical drives, and other internal accessories.
Nvidia bought 3dfx in late 2000, before the Voodoo 5 6000 or something like it could hit the market. Nvidia and ATI (and then AMD after AMD bought ATI) were the only big players in the dedicated graphics market for over two decades until Intel finally released its first dedicated Arc GPUs in 2022.
Listing image from gtastuntcrew302/eBay