3dfx Voodoo 4 prototypes

Earliest known VSA-100 board dated 42nd week of 1999, fully functional with all the options and 64 mb of ram.

V4-4500-  32 MB engineering board dated 44-99, the very first operating PCI PCB revision, hand tuned & reworked VSA-100 prototype! Currently not functioning but hoping to be repaired in the near future. PCB # 210-0389-01-A1 

It has been *suggested* that this *might* be an "oven" board- 

"These are the boards that they "cook" in the lab to make sure they pass thermal stress tests and pass FCC (or whoever the government body is) so they won't burn down your house. They take a system and put it in an oven and crank it (the gpu) up to high stress while slowly upping the temperature until failure."

Another "copper" 4500 but with an interesting twist.

This one is socketed! 

Engineer notes:  The socket is from Nepenthe, costs about $1000 USD and it uses gold plated spring loaded pogo pins to make contact between the PCB and the chip. The copper tape is there to increase the force on the chip, when it is installed in the socket. The pins wear down after several hundred of insertions. You can test chips before soldering them down, it saves a lot of debug time.

(back shown)

Board has perfect function with bios 1.11 clocked at 166 mhz.

Prototype 4500 "L" card with 32 MB of ram, 26-00 date, perfect function too. 

Notice the VGA connector sticking out beyond the PCB? It was a "woops!"

V4-4800- Another very elusive board, a 64 MB single chip VSA-100 with DVI and TV out options! Was slated for production but dropped from the line up along with the V5-5000 to simplify options or reduce operating costs. 

Board date is 26-00

V4-4500- Not much info on this card, nothing that really stands out aside from the "NOT FOR RESALE" decals. Board is three weeks older then most 4500 AGP cards that I have seen (build date 30-00) and carries 32 MB of Micron Tech ram 6 ns and bios number 1.18. One odd thing of note is that the area around the unused ram spots is rough like the board had extra ram on it at one time, the back side of the board has round 3dfx system testing stamps and the backplate has no screw marks showing the card being installed permanently in anything

V4-4500 PCI with DVI, VGA and S-Video TV out jack with PC not Mac BIOS.