Voodoo3-3500TV

Whats all the commotion about?? What's so cool about the 3dfx Voodoo3-3500TV?? Well, were gonna take the 3500TV for a spin and let you know what we think. Deal??

183MHz 128-bit 2D/3D core

183 Megapixels per second

366 Megatexels per second peak fill rate

8 Million polygons per second peak processing power

Resolution support up to 2046 x 1536

PCI/AGP Support - No AGP Texturing Support

16-bit 3D Rendering Support - No 32-bit 3D Rendering Support

350MHz Integrated RAMDAC

16MB SDRAM

NTSC Composite/S-Video Out

NTSC Composite/S-Video In

TV/FM Tuner Input

Direct3D/OpenGL/Glide API Support

Per pixel perspective correct texture mapping

16/24-bit Z buffer

Support for 8-bit palletized text

The 3500 uses a Phillips made FM/TV tuner. The FM/TV tuner features both coaxial FM and TV inputs that connect directly to the Phillips tuner. Amazingly enough, although the ammount of capacitors on the 3500TV is double that of the 2000 - 3000 the size of the cards are roughly the same. Pretty impressive since most of the PCB is taken up by that big silver TV tuner and the big black heatsink.

As with all of the cards tested here on Hypothermia, we automatically replace the stock coolers with TennMax coolers. See Photo:

The card features no VGA output, rather a 30-pin Plug & Display output port which has been used for Flat Panel displays in the past but now connects to the 3500's "break-out-box" which contains a split cable for an analog VGA input

The P&D port is powered by the Xilinx 9572XL controller that also functions as a bridge between the video capture and the Voodoo3 chip itself thereby allowing 3dfx to use the Voodoo3's current design unmodified while adding support for a FM/TV tuner and video capture. In theory the Xilinx 9572XL should be able to drive a Digital Flat Panel display off of the 30-pin P&D port on the board. Then again, I am no expert. . and the spec sheet doesn't say that it supports this technology. . . we are simply working in theory. Since the Hypothermia crew doesn't have a nice Digital Flat Panel to test this theory on, it will remain just that. . a theory.

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