The Banshee! (1998)

Banshee was 3dfx's first in-house integrated 2d/3d solution. In simple terms it was a Voodoo 2 with only one texture management unit paired to an excellent 128 bit 2d core on a single 0.35-micron chip running at 100/100 mhz* compared to the Voodoo 2's 90 mhz clock. In games that did not use multi-texturing the Banshee had the edge over Voodoo 2 due to it's higher clock speed. In games that utilized multi-texturing the Voodoo 2 was faster due to the extra texture management unit. The Banshee also had the slight edge in image quality since no pass through cable was required. The Banshee was targeted at casual gamers and OEM sales and 3dfx reportedly sold over 1 million chipsets.

* The Banshee is the only 3dfx chip that has separate clocks for ram and core. On all other 3dfx products the core and ram were clock-locked together.

Lots of Banshees out there, since most of the came with heatsinks I'll show you the ones with fans!

Considered the *BEST* Banshee made, the Gigabyte GA-630 16 MB SGRAM not only had a fan and would overclock to the moon and back there was also some other mojo going on in that PCB that made this the Banshee card to own. It flat out kicked butt in the benchmarks vs other Banshee cards. You can click here to see the GA-630 display properties in a new window.

The Diamond Fusion 16MB SDRAM seems to be the most common fan equipped Banshee on the market, sold in both AGP and PCI flavors. The card has been seen in both SGRAM and SDRAM configurations as well.

 Gainwards Dragon 4000 16 MB SDRAM was sold in three configurations I have noted- with a small passive green heatsink, a large passive green heatsink and with a fan with small heatsink. This card has also surfaced in other vendors boxes as well. This one is brand spanking new and was purchased off Ebay.

Powercolor's EvilQueen 16 MB SGRAM Banshee direct from the German Republic via Ebay.

Winfast S310 16 MB SGRAM Banshee- A very rare card, purchased from Taiwan!

Viewtop Vulcan B 16MB SDRAM Banshee, this card is from England.

Helios 16MB SGRAM Banshee- Another card that has been noted in third party boxes time to time.

Because I like Metabyte here is their Wicked3d Vengeance Banshee PCI.

Quantum3d Raven with stereo glasses output, love that black PCB.