First Impressions
The card comes in the normal 3dfx large box typically with a silly picture on the front! It has large plastic internal packaging with the card sitting in the middle. Yep, a large card with 2 fans on it. When I looked for the full bundled game which I was used too I was surprised not to have any at all! All I had was a demo CD. Demos are nice but it would be even better for 3dfx to have shipped this card with one or two popular full games to show off the advantages of FSAA as well as giving a better deal for the consumer.The main thing that I noticed about this card is that it is HUGE, with its dual VSA chips with small active cooling applied (small heatsink/fan combo's). The card features 64MB of onboard ram. I think they could have made the card physically smaller more like the GeForce 2 GTS cards that the V5 5500 is compared to, but they may want people to think 'wh00p! This card is sooo large it must have something special about it!'. As mentioned, the VSA chips have a small HSF combo like on GeForce's. These 2 chips must get kind of hot, they also must use a lot of power! This is when you notice that there is a standard 4-pin hard drive type power connector on the board, which is needed to supply extra power to the card. There's a large yellow label on the plastic casing saying "Your Card won't work unless you plug in a power cable"! This idea I feel is somewhat cool :) Maybe I just like pointless additions like this ;) The V5 5500's power requirements are unlike the GeForce 2 GTS cards that simply just get power from the I/O voltage linked to your AGP port.
Installation:
Installation took a matter of minutes! I pulled out my GeForce 2 GTS and put in the Voodoo 5 5500 and despite it's size, it fitted perfectly in my Coolermaster ATX case. I can see that there could be a problem in some smaller, cheaper ATX cases, but it shouldn't affect too many people. I powered up and was straight into Windows in no time at all. Installing the drivers under Win98 was easy! I put the CD in and away we go - one reboot later the system was rocking! One thing I wasn't happy about and I don't think I should even take notice of was the large piece of paperwork which came with this board titled "faults" and how to fix them. I somewhat feel that 3dfx know there are problems and it seems strange that they ship cards with such documentation to the general public. But really, after more thought, I say "good idea 3dfx!" Many other cards crop up with problems as they mature and solutions have to be found (not always by the manufacturer) so the idea of 3dfx to supply details to fix known problems is quite commendable as it would save a lot of searching on the internet for solutions which would result in yet more downtime from you using your new video card!
