Having said that, for now, the fastest Voodoo3 board that is readily available (see the news story posted today about the 2000 and 3000 shipping) is the 3000 clocked at 166MHz. Our benchmarks showed the 3000 to also be the fastest current SHIPPING (an important point) 2D/3D graphics accelerator and hence it's no slouch. Burke went on to add,

There is tremendous benefit to the end user from binning the Voodoo3 to multiple speeds. For serious gamers faster is better, so by taking those parts that are able to operate at higher speeds and actually testing and qualifying them at those speeds we're delivering a great value to the end users. They will get the fastest speeds without over clocking and with all the benefits and assurance of a production - qualified part. Separating out the slower parts... I have to make a self-serving comment here, you know that our "slow" 143MHz part is faster than most of our competitors' fastest parts! Back to the point, by separating out the slower parts we are able to pair them with slower and hence less expensive memories therefore we can make the boards a lot more cost effective. Not everyone is willing or able to pay for the fastest 3dfx accelerator and speed binning lets us create a great, low-cost part for them.

As we stated to you in a recent update, we've since been given a fourth 3500 which runs very stabily at 183MHz and updated our Voodoo3 3500 scores accordingly. To be fair, 3dfx also informed us that this board is somewhat of a 'hot rod' In other words it's an 'exception to the engineering rule' and defies the general rule of thumb of the manufacturing process. Not only does this board run stabily clocked at 183MHz but we also managed to successfully overclock it. In fact, we got the 3500 way beyond 183MHz speed that 3dfx is set to ship the 3500 at.

But just how much does raising the Voodoo3's clock speed bar 'do' for the hardcore tweaking freak in the real world? Well as we said earlier, we've been able to overclock our Voodoo3 3500 in excess of 3dfx's 'suggested' 183MHz clock speed. We went as high as 220MHz (at 225MHz the board still ran but occasionally crashed so we thought it best to put a stop to such behavior) and ran some benchmarks for you to get an idea of the real 'worth' (or not as the case may be) in overclocking the Voodoo3. Bear in mind that although there's a lot more to gaining higher framer rates than just raising the clock speeds. Some games might well be fill rate limited and the increased memory bandwidth could indeed help but, as the scores in Quake 2 show, the benefits are still minimal.