I always thought my Pentium III 933 MHz was a very good match for my Voodoo5, but it seems that I'm actually still quite CPU limited.

In UT2003 which I put on this old machine, I actually get identical scores in flyby (the supposedly non CPU heavy of the benchmarks) at 1024x768 and 800x600! So this means it's still CPU limited.

A large reason for this surely is that fact that V5 has to do all T&L in software. This obviously takes out a hefty chunk of your CPU especially in a game like UT2003, but it must also mean that the Voodoo5 would actaully scale better than the T&L cards of the time with faster processors than were available at release.

So for those of you who've hung onto your Voodoo5 cards to put into Pentium 4 and AthlonXP systems, what would you say is the CPU speed needed to absolutely max out the potential of these cards? 1.5 GHz? 2 GHz?

I'm curious! I have a feeling that UT2003 would run quite smoothly on a Voodoo5 and 2.0 GHz processor! And as for the Voodoo5 6000, that would probably run like butter! Sadly I cannot try it myself because my P4 board doesn't support AGP 3.3 volt.

My voodoo 5 stopped showing increases after about 2.2ghz.  I originally upgraded from an Athlon xp2000+ @ 1.8ghz to a xp2800+.  After i started overclocking the 2800+ the voodoo5 went higher until about 2.2ghz.

upping your FSB may still increase speed on the V5 after 2.2Ghz.

I had upped the FSB from 180 to 190 and there was minimal difference....

2.2? Wow.

I might try to get a hold of a second hand P4 2.0 GHz board with DDR266 or to replace the Pentium III in this other system.

I'm talking about going from 180 to 400 or 800 Mhz.  even at 2.2Ghz with a 400Mhz or 800 Mhz FSB, the V5's I have been told go much faster.  I think it all has to do with mainboard memory speed since the V5 has no AGP texture crap (4x/8x do nothing for Voodoos even if they could run at the voltage etc.).

180-190DDR = 360-380Mhz bus speed.   As i said, it started dropping off after 180DDR, and as we all know voodoo5's aren't too P4 friendly for 800 bus....

the problem with the Intel P4's is the AGP slot is NOT a universal slot which can handle any voltage agp card.  the FSB has nothing to do with not being able to run the cards in an intel motherboard.  just run a PCI V5 in an intel board, there is no perceptible difference in speed between the V5 in an AGP slot and a V5 in a PCI slot.  If you could get a motherboard with a 66Mhz PCI slot (like a server mainboard) then there would be NO difference between the two.

With AMD processors (AthlonXP and better, not Duron!) you'll max out about 2.2GHz.

With Intel processors (Pentium 4) you'll need some more megahertz's.
I've got a P4 2,26GHz and I'm not yet at the limit. I know that because AMD AthlonXP 2200+ CPU's (which don't run at 2,2GHz offcourse) perform slightly better.

I'm thinking that with AMD you'll max out around 2,2 ~ 2,4GHz.
With Intel you'll max out around 2,6 ~ 3,0GHz