In context: Having a graphics card powerful enough to play 3D games on a laptop in the early 2000s was pretty much unheard of as the technology just hadn't matured enough yet. However, one retro enthusiast is demonstrating just how far things have come by shoehorning a Voodoo4 graphics processor into a laptop.
Daniel Simionescu, aka "sdz" on the Vogons forums, has created what he calls the "Voodoo 4 M4800." The project involved transplanting the processor from a Voodoo4 4500 AGP card onto a custom MXM board, which he then plugged into the expansion slot of a 2013 Dell Precision M4800 laptop. Despite being over a decade old, the laptop is new enough to handle the power and cooling needs of the Voodoo4 chip.
For the uninitiated, the Voodoo 4 was a graphics card by 3Dfx built on a 250nm process and based on the VSA-100 graphics processor. The card supported DirectX 6.0 in its Napalm 26-220 variant.
Sdz fabricated a custom board to adapt the Voodoo VSA-100 GPU to the MXM format, using an FPGA to handle some compatibility translation work. Video output runs over LVDS to the laptop's display, with an onboard scaler chip helping to match the panel's native resolution.
Overclocked to 192 MHz and equipped with 64 MB of RAM, sdz's creation can run the 2001 3DMark benchmark at a very respectable 2,035 points. That's top-end performance for a VSA-100 chip.
However, there are still some limitations and quirks to work out. The overclock doesn't run properly inside the laptop yet, likely due to a configuration issue. "Either something is messed up in that system, or this is somehow caused by the lack of VSA BIOS," notes sdz.
Overall, it's an incredible project that demonstrates how you can take practically any silicon and run it in hardware wildly different from its original design target. The Voodoo4 was made for desktops, yet here it is rendering 3D inside what was a high-end laptop barely a decade ago.
Sdz says he has no plans to sell pre-made Voodoo 4 M4800 units. However, for those brave enough to take on such a hack job themselves, he says he'll be open-sourcing all the technical documentation and board designs.