What good is a review if everything is positive? Well, as much as I like to go on and on about how great the card is, there are some downs that I should mention. DVD playback is a big thing nowadays with ATi, Matrox, S3, and Nvidia all offering some type of motion compensation built into their boards. The Voodoo5 does not have any motion compensation or hardware assisted playback. In fact, the DVD decoding on the Voodoo5 is exactly like it is on the Voodoo3, not apparent. This is unfortunate because as people start to watch movies on their PC, they would want a card that would help make the movies look better. Even if you have the fastest PC on earth, you will want motion compensation because of the smoothness and fluidity it gives the DVD movie.

Although this wont be a big problem for most of you, the Voodoo5 5500 draws power directly from the computer's power supply and that might be a problem for those with small power supplies. My old Sony microtower had a 90W power supply, put this card in and the power supply might not have enough power to give it the 24W it needs. Also, its massive size might obstruct cables and cords inside the case like it did mine. To get around this, all that needs to be done is rubber band the cables together and slip it under or over the card. Also, the size of the card might obstruct air passage through the case in some conditions.

When I ran 3D Mark, the program would unexpectedly crash out to the desktop. This is a rare occurrence but nevertheless something that should be looked into. If there were one thing to blame for this, it would probably be the early drivers or a specific benchmark that 3D Mark was trying to do. I could not finish my 3D Mark 2000 benchmarks because of the constant crashing. Of course the source of the problem could also be my system. However, when playing games, they would almost always remain stable. Even though it had a problem in 3D Mark, the drivers were amazingly stable for first releases. The programmers should be commended.

I have no idea what the game bundle will be like because it still hasn't been determined so please don't email me asking me if I know =). Same thing with documentation, the unit I received had no printed documentation, only a PDF file on the CD. I strongly believe that 3dfx will include a printed manual in the shipping box on release.