My voodoo 6000 had a Molex connector, I guess to facilitate testing in ordinary pcs.

(I didn’t realise what I had until years after I threw it out! I only picked it up because it was so impressive-looking: comically enormous board, four fans.)

Uh, as far as I recall, the 6000 never reached retail shelves.

There were at least 1000 test units, so it wasn’t impossible to get one’s hands on a board.

The voodoo5 5500 had molex power connector on the card. The voodoo5 6000 had an external psu.

Sorry - was just speaking about the possibility of buying a 6k. It’s been so long I wouldn’t trust my own memory of which board had which configuration so didn’t intend to comment on that discussion.

You had a voodoo5 5500.

That's what I assumed, and it was only when I was idly googling for 3dfx stuff a few years ago that I realised it probably wasn't. The 5500s all look to have 2 chips, and are normal sized. Mine had four chips, and it was... large. Like, very large. Also had a plastic handle.

Looked a bit like this one: https://robertkrau.se/blog/3dfx-voodoo-5-6000-stripe-artifac...

Here's one with a Molex connector: http://www.x86-secret.com/articles/divers/v5-6000/v56kgb-6.h... (I can't remember whether it was wires or soldered in on mine, this was 20 years ago and I didn't spend much time playing with it)

I got it from the storeroom at the video games company I was working for at the time. They were having a clear out, and we could take whatever we wanted. This was one of the things I wanted.

(Sadly they didn't let me have the Jaguar devkit, doubly annoying when I later discovered that Atari had put all their Jaguar stuff into the public domain. Mind you, I'd only have thrown that out too as well, probably, so same result in the end.)

Interesting stuff. I worked at 3dfx in the last few months of their existence. All the 6000 I saw had the external psu. I was just an IT nerd so I wasn't involved with the cards.

> With this weeks' news of the 4090 using 450 watts at peak,

Flagship GPUs like the 3090 Ti have had 450W TDPs for a while now and they work fine. It's not a new thing with the 40xx series cards.

I get the snark but that's peak power. Chances are that VooDoo uses more power at idle than the 4090. Modern silicone is very efficient are throttling down at idle and old GPUs would use max power all the time.