Quantum3D Ventana Rush, Banshee & Ventana V3-3500
The Quantum3D Ventana 50 Voodoo Rush... A ridiculously rare card that I have not even heard mention of till the day when this one showed up on my doorstep.
One thing that really makes you go hmm...... it has a connector for a daughter card over the texture management unit and 3dfx documents hint that the Voodoo Rush chipset supports another TMU. I'd be willing to bet a Shade TMU unit from a 100SB fits... comparing the two I'd say it will work.. then one day I finally obtain a Shade module.... hmm, it fits... with some trepidation I install the board in a machine and fire it up... so far so good, no smoke... load drivers... no problems... as soon as a 3D application is called it locks up.
Bummer! I suspect either a revised bios is required or modified drivers, I tried both the Quantum drivers and 3dfx reference drivers with the same results. Who knows? A Rush board with 2 TMU's might have been planned and being tested but got axed due to the bad reviews the Rush boards had in the press. Sure does look pretty though =)
This specimen was a Quantum3D lab board from an ex-employee.
Woo! Found the right drivers for the beast, I bet it's been a long time since these have seen the light of day.
Blurb found on the 'net mentioning Quantum3D and a Rush card, interesting.
"VRSG will be demonstrated on a WinTel PII 300 MHz with a Quantum3D Voodoo Rush-based graphics accelerator displaying in a sizable window the full 24 x 24 km Ft. Benning terrain database <http://www.metavr.com/mout-complete.htm>. IUSS Version 3.0 will be running concurrently with VRSG on the same personal computer and the display will be a 27" monitor.
Quantum3D was and still is big into military simulators and high end rendering platforms- It looks like they may have had a number of products geared towards these markets that never saw the light of day in the consumer market. Its starting to look like the Ventana line of cards were all used for mil-simulators and high end OpenGL platforms based on the clues that have been unearthed recently.
Be sure to check out the Ventana 50's relative the MGV-PCI over at the Quicksilver arcade system page.
Quantum3d Raven Banshee with stereo glasses output- Reference 3dfx SDRAM Banshee design but did come with three very popular games at the time. (GEX: Enter the Gecko and arcade hits NFL Blitz and San Francisco Rush the Rock: Alcatraz edition) The Raven was priced at $119 with $30 rebate.
Very difficult to obtain Raven PCI. The same card is used in some arcade equipment!
What is more difficult to obtain then a Quantum3D Raven PCI? How about an AArdvark Banshee board with dual video outputs!! This piece was test board from Quantum3D and the VGA 2D/3D works perfect. The second connector is for EGA/CGA output required by some older arcade monitors.
Read more about AArdvark on the Quantum3D arcade page.
Very rare 166 mhz Quantum3d Ventana Voodoo-3 3500, Date code 30-99, PCB #600-0900-99
The Ventana under testing- This card runs hot! I suspect it doesn't have the original heatsink since a V3-3000 at 166 mhz has a much larger unit. I strongly suspect that this card ran a small heatsink with a fan as the heatsink that is on the card is to small for 166 mhz operation and when I tried to fit a 3000 heatsink on it ran into a set of pins! Closer examination of the pins shows that they are a fan header connection! If anyone has a picture of an unmolested Q3D Ventana please let me know if it uses a fan with heatsink or not and the correct Quantum3d V3 drivers would be cool too! Quantum3d made a number of cards under the Ventana name including Rush, Voodoo II and Banshee. I have a copy of the Banshee drivers, but not the V3 based ones.
Quantum3D Nvidia based Obsidian 3 Quadro DCC board.
