Prototype of the final unreleased 3dfx GPU sells on eBay for $15,000

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  The Voodoo 5 6000 GPU, 3dfx's unreleased swan song. [credit: gtastuntcrew302/eBay ]

Graphics cards cost more than they used to, but it turns out that they can get even more expensive when they're also a rare collector's item. A late-revision prototype of the unreleased Voodoo 5 6000—intended as the flagship of the Voodoo 5 GPU family—sold on eBay this week for $15,000, a price that makes the GeForce RTX 4090 look cheap by comparison.

The GPU was said to be in "excellent condition" and appears to be fully functional—seller gtastuntcrew302 posted a screenshot of the card achieving a score of 6,995 in 3DMark 2000 run at a 1024×768 resolution. These cards were never sold at retail, and only about 1,000 prototypes were manufactured, according to Piotr Gontarczyk's Polish-language history of 3dfx.

"This card was personally reworked by the well known 3DFX engineer Hank Semenec for fully stable 8X FSAA (I have personally verified that this card is rock solid at 8X)," wrote the seller. "Unlike a lot of other Voodoo 5 6000 prototypes, this one is from the later stages of the 6K prototype project where the vast majority of bugs have been ironed out."

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from Gaming & Culture – Ars Technica https://ift.tt/MVkjBAY