Since nVidia and ATI video cards are very popular nowadays, some people prefer not to use advanced technologies. A refurbished video card can be a good solution in many cases. For instance, watching movies or TV programs does not require strong and high performance video adapters. Thus, you can make a cheap refurbished video card work for you for many years with some modifications.

If you are thinking about purchasing some discount video cards, then you should not buy anything you will see at once. Voodoo video cards can be better for you, as these adapters were the most popular graphical devices some years ago. In the Voodoo 3 series the video card Voodoo3 2000 was the most popular device. This was the first item from the family 3DFX. The Voodoo3 2000 was the first video card, which was accelerated by overclockers.

There is a PCI version of the Voodoo 3 2000. Look at the technical parameters of the Voodoo3 2000 (these parameters are not so amazing as for Radeon or GeForce, but they are wonderful if you aim at a refurbished video card): a combined 2D/3D video card that supports resolutions up to 2046x1536 with an excellent 2D quality and has RAMDAC 300 MHZ; a graphical processor Voodoo3 and 16 MB SDRAM memory; AGP 2x or PCI interfaces; a speed of filling is 143 mega pixels per second and a top speed of filling is 286 mega pixels per second; a top speed of processing is 6 millions polygons per second; a memory bandwidth is 2.29 GB per second; an original technology of one-pass multi-texturing; a one-pass, one-cycled bump-mapping; a one-pass, one-cycled three-linear MIP-Mapping; mapping of programmable table mist; a sub-pixel and sub-texel correction; Gourand Shading; a support of Glide2 and Glide3, OpenGL ICD, DirectX.

The Voodoo3 2000 works with clock 143 MHz. The memory and chip clocks are the same for this family of cards. The version 2000 does not have a video output. Hence, if you need this function, you should think about another modification - Voodoo3 3000. Actually, the performance of AGP and PCI modifications of the Voodoo3 is absolutely identical. This situation makes the refurbished video card Voodoo3 2000 PCI an ideal solution for the modification of a computer that does not have the AGP slot. This is true for the motherboards Intel 810, Super7 systems, etc.

The AGP version of the video card was an excellent choice before the appearance of 3DFX Velocity 100. This 3DFX video card is built on the modified Voodoo3 chip. It happens that you can switch on the second texture processor TMU on the Velocity 100. The Velocity 100 appears to be better than the Voodoo3 2000 in some games with the resolution up to 800x600. The reason is a faster SGRAM memory, used for the Velocity. The 8 MB of Velocity video memory is enough to store textures for many games.