Brazos

Brazos was 3dfx's venture into the motherboard market with an onboard Voodoo3 graphics chip. Source: Maximum PC Magazine, June 2002 (unlike they, I actually cite my sources).

Histroy
Back in 1998, STB was designing a motherboard with an integrated nVidia TNT solution whcih would've been the first decent 3D offering integrated into a motherboard. This board was demoed at the 1998 Comdex Convention. Soon after, 3dfx bought STB and the development on the motherboard continued with a Voodoo3. Unfortunately, the Voodoo3's 64-bit memory bus made the PCB (6 layers) too complex to develop in mass, hence making it too expensive and not viable for production. The motherboard also had provisions to support the upcoming Napalm chip (wmhich would've also made the PCB more complex with a 128-bit memory bus; VSA-100, Voodoo4/5), which was only supposed to launch 4 months after Brazos was ready to ship. Of course, Napalm was delayed and Brazos was never launched.


Part Specifications
Chipset Intel 440BX
CPU Intel Pentium II / III
Front Side Bus 100mhz
Graphics 3dfx Voodoo3 (200/200, maybe at a .25e process)
Sound Aureal Vortex
RAM Slots 3x 100mhz SDRAM
Expansion Slots 1x AGP, 1x AMR, 3x PCI


What If?
If 3dfx was able to mass produce this board without the PCB problems then it would've been the most advanced onboard graphics solution available. Most PCs at the time were shipping with onboard ATi Rage or Intel chips and this would've easily let OEMs sell high performance gaming PCs at a relatively low cost compared to boards that needed 3D add-in cards. If Napalm came out on time, the board probably wouldn't have used a Napalm chip, but would've waited for Daytona to come to silicon. The 64-bit bus on daytona with the same performance as a single chip Napalm solution would've made this board very enticing for OEMs.


Pictures
A picture of one of the three known Brazos prototype boards. This one was property of Falcon Northwest.
1) The Voodoo3 onboard graphics chip.
2) The Aureal Vortex chip for onboard 3D sound.
3) 16 MB of VRAM. HY57V161610D TC-55 9917A KOREA.


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