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While the connections are varied and extensive, I did find it strange that the V3 3500 still has a pass-through cable from the monitor and the video card. It's called a "Custom I/O Connector" and connects to the back for the 3500, then your monitor is connected to the I/O Pod through a different line. While this method didn't give me any technical problems or image quality issues, it still makes you dependant on the I/O Pod for your basic video needs, whether you intend to use the advanced video features or not. The Matrox Marvel used much the same route, but you were always free to dump the multimedia box and just hook your monitor up to the back of the card.
The Voodoo3 3500 card itself is also a bit of a surprise, sporting a enamel black heat sink and 16 MB of Hyundai 5.5 ns SDRAM. After testing out the V3 3000, I was really expecting 3dfx to include a cooling fan with their newest card. Perhaps since heat isn't any worse than with the V3 3000 at stock speeds, 3dfx felt they didn't really need the extra cooling. The heat sink does quite well at 183 MHz, but without additional cooling, you most likely won't be going too much higher than 190-200 MHz with the stock heatsink and 5.5 ns memory.
The Voodoo3 3500 also has a few internal connectors of interest. There are audio-in and audio-out as well as a digital video input connector. The audio connectors are of special interest, since if you are going to be watching or recording TV on your monitor, you will need to run an audio cable from the V3 3500 to your soundcard, and to maintain digital sound, from your CD-ROM to the V3's audio-in connector. The Voodoo3 3500 review card did not include an extra audio cable, but a notice on their website states that it is now shipping with the V3 3500 and 3dfx will ship cables out to buyers who did not receive them. NTSC/PAL TV encoding is handled by a Brooktree Bt869 and the TV-tuner is the very capable Philips FM1236. Stereo and video decoding are processed by a couple of Micronas chips, the MSP34XX and VPX3225 respectively.
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