The VSA-100 Family

All kinds of Voodoo

The Voodoo 5 5500 uses 3dfx's new VSA-100 chip. VSA stands for Voodoo Scalable Architecture. This new architecture will allow up to 32 VSA-100 chips to run in parallel on the same board or spanning multiple boards. Consumers will have access to the the 1, 2, and 4 chip configurations. Larger configurations will probably only find their way into high-end workstations.

The V4 4500 will only have a single VSA-100 chip. The V5 5000 and 5500 will sport dual chip configurations, and the V5 6000 will weigh in with 4 chips.

V5 4500

V5 5500

The Voodoo 4 and Voodoo 5 line up has changed slightly since 3dfx first announced it at Comdex last fall.

V5 6000

All Three

Updates

Here's the original product list that we have from our Comdex notes:

Voodoo 4 4000, 1-chip, 16MB, AGP and PCI, $179
Voodoo 5 5000, 2-chip, 32MB, AGP and PCI, $229
Voodoo 5 5500, 2-chip, 64MB, AGP only, $299
Voodoo 5 6000, 4-chip, 128MB, AGP only, $599

Here's what it's looking like now:

Voodoo 4 4500, 1-chip, 32MB, AGP and PCI, $179
Voodoo 5 5000, 2-chip, 32MB, PCI and/or AGP, $229
Voodoo 5 5500, 2-chip, 64MB, AGP and/or PCI, $299
Voodoo 5 6000, 4-chip, 128MB, AGP only, $599

Notes

The product lineup looks the same with some minor differences. 3dfx hasn't announced any shipping products beyond the V5 5500 AGP, so the rest of the cards still aren't finalized yet. The AGP and PCI formats following the "and/or," are cards that may or may not be manufactured, because there might not be a market for those tweener cards. Prices haven't changed since November. So expect to fork over $599 to get that 4-chip monster.