Pentium 4

[austin86]

There has always been demand for 3dfx cards, unless you won't ship, can't take PayPal, and live in the middle of nowhere. Check eBay the stuff sells all the time.

I used to take paypal and had most of my older hardware 3dfx included on ebay, I only just started to do things locally late last year after getting rid of my bank account and switching to a brokerage account. nothing, not one bid on ebay, not one question asked on ebay, nothing at all. anyone who thinks 3dfx stuff is in demand is crazy. I actually owned the stuff and tried to sell it off and on for years and none of it sold, not even for free when I offered to cover the shipping did anyone want it. I had them listed on hwbot, ebay, a dozen smaller forums, market place, took them to local flee markets, ocn, overclockers, hardforum, the ltt forums, the reddit hwswap page and so many other sites. This is the only site were anyone actually showed any interest in them at all. CRTs are the same way, people say they're in demand but I find them on the side of the road all the time, my garage is full of them and even at 5$ a pop I can't move them unless if they have a biult in VCR/dvd player and are smaller as people buy those kind for a kids room. same for DFI lanparty motherboards, I was able to give a few away for free or at the cost of shipping over on HWBOT, but nobody wanted to pay for them, yet if you go in ebay you will see listings for a few 100$ a board... what people ask for is not what they're getting. if they were truly in demand people would have gobbled everything up when I was giving them away for free last summer. in the end it was the scrap yard that was willing to pay for the old hardware after years of trying to sell them elsewhere.

 

[Unknown_K]

anyone who thinks 3dfx stuff is in demand is crazy.

I say bullshit on that. Ebay has page after pages on completed 3dfx listings the vast majority are in green meaning they were sold with decent prices (many in the multiple hundreds).

And we have this Voodoo 5 6000 clone that sold for $3,625 (because 3dfx is not collectable).

https://www.ebay.com/itm/147321048134

 

[Zare]

Someone payed almost 4K for a fake Voodoo?
That should tell you everything about its audience.

Voodoo is an accessoire. Like a designer handbag. You pay to have it and to be an owner. Same with overpriced Creative and Gravis cards. At least the 3dfx is a quality item compared to them, in original era.

Think about it, somebody bought an Gravis Ultrasound card, 30 year old, with absolutely shitty audio design from the get go and atrocious sound quality on its output.
They paid 500e for it. They could've paid twice less for a clone card that has far better quality.

So my opinion is you both are correct - these items can sell for insane money, but it is not easy to sell them for insane money. There are obviously a few people around willing to pay, you need to somehow reach them. If you know the bunch that pays 100e+ for ordinary Creative cards (just take a look at sold listings) send them over my way, I will give you 10%.

 

[Unknown_K]

That reproduction card had at least 4 bidders and started at $499 so that shows more than one person was interested in it.

I have tons of creative cards and a few gravis ultrasounds, if you want to play the old games on real hardware the way it sounded back in the day (hiss and all) you need them. Gravis Ultrasounds were the preferred way of playing demo's and trackers loved them because they could play 32 sound channels in hardware.

Old ISA creative SoundBlaster (there are a ton of varieties to these, and millions made) are cheaper than a GUS because SB's were the best supported cards for the longest time and many were made and still around.

 

[GiGaBiTe]

I'll never understand why people want old Sound Blaster cards, they were garbage, and Creative is a garbage company. Anything older than an AWE64 had terrible problems with hissing, bus noise, hanging notes, bad FM emulation and other strange bugs from shoddy Creative engineering. Even the AWE64 had problems, but they weren't nearly as bad as the older cards. And we were largely stuck with them because they were the Apple or John Deere of their time.

They were fiercely anti-competitive and colluded with Yamaha to have an illegal agreement to stonewall Adlib and torpedo their next generation card to kill them off. They bought up another competitor Ensoniq and killed them off.

Yamaha themselves got into the sound card business, but their drivers were hot garbage, and it's neigh impossible to get their cards working properly.

 

[Unknown_K]

Some SB cards had hanging note problems, some didn't. Sure, S/N wasn't the best on the Pro 2.0 or earlier but playing Star Wars Xwing on a SB16 + Yamaha DB50XG wave blaster back in the days was a s close to heaven a DOS gamer could get.

 

[Zare]

Wasn't the best is an understatement...I also do not agree that cheap plastic speakers and hiss are the part of "authentic experience". My comp was hooked on hifi back then.

I agree with Gigabite in regards to Creative (junk company, back then, and now too), but I think it's not AWE64 before/after. The AWE cards had better sound design but they lacked FM chip and had the CQM emulation.

 

[rmay635703]

Wasn't the best is an understatement...I also do not agree that cheap plastic speakers and hiss are the part of "authentic experience". My comp was hooked on hifi back then.

I agree with Gigabite in regards to Creative (junk company, back then, and now too), but I think it's not AWE64 before/after. The AWE cards had better sound design but they lacked FM chip and had the CQM emulation.

Agreed the authentic experience was audio as experienced in the game bez pegs then upgrading to the audio. In Duke nukem 1

Meanwhile I had a Tandy RLX 286 through most of the dos era with 3 voice