Recently purchased a 3DFX Voodoo 5 AGP on ebay for $50. Installed it and it booted and ran fine, until... I tried to play a game. Nothing, just black screen. I rebooted and entered dxdiag. Ran a test on Direct 3D and same thing, freezing directx box. Installed Windows ME with 1.04 reference drivers. Same thing, rotating box in dxdiag would freeze. Does a Voodoo 5 require a certain amount of wattage from the PSU because of the power plug? Usually cards just die? Any other suggestions? THANKS!

try uninstalling  drivers i had a problem like this in winxp and what's the psu wattage and your PC's hardware  

and by the way you don't need to post the same topic in two spots
http://www.3dfxzone.it/enboard/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=14172

Wattage is 250 and I did a fresh install on both XP & ME to try to get this to work.
It's definately the Voodoo 5 5500 AGP
I put in a Nvidia Vanta LT AGP, Voodoo 3 AGP & now a ATI Radeon X1650 AGP (which uses a floppy power wire).
All work!
When using dxdiag Test Direct 3D to test the Voodoo5, the spinning box would spin very slow, lock up, or reboot, depending on the drivers. But when testing the ATI Radeon X1600AGP which is a more demanding board (512mb), it works fine, as do the others.
ODD!

what is the cpu in your pc.
Have try other drivers.
and if you know how update the bios.
are the fans spinning on the card  if they aren't it will heat up so much that it can start to have problems  
ATI  card's don't take up much power I have a Radeon 9250 pro and i run it in p4 1.7 GHz pc with  a 200w psu
and try to look over the card closely to see if you can find a pin missing  or a crack in a ram cart and or other defects
and your motherboard bios setting  might have to be set up differently for the voodoo 5500
I'd say it's the psu but I don't know enough  

It's an old Gateway PC
AMD Athlon 1gig
384mb ram
250W PS
I've tried different drivers, reference and unofficial, the only difference is when and how it freezes, crashes or reboots.
Tried XP, ME...
I'm hesitant to pull out the 250W PS and replace with another. After all, did they even make anything over a 250W when this card came out? Could it have lost power over the years, it is an old PS & PC?
But why no problems with the Radeon?

dose it have problems when playing games all you sad is that it ran slow when running dxdiag Test
also try it a different pc  if you have one
get a bigger psu it might have problems and there was bigger psu back then up to 330 if I renumber right
reinstall windows just because you did a fresh install dose not mean it install right
try changing the bios for the card  if you know how
if it still dose not work then we can say it's dead

That was the first thing I did which made me believe the card was dead, was play a game (Star Wars Rogue Squadron, Croc). I swapped the PSU with a 400W, same problem. I'm trying to dig up another computer to try it in that.