HUGE honor to have Mike work on my gear as I've been a fan since I first found his channel. Thank you for all your hard work on these! I'm excited to have two working V3s back in my collection - and that 4mb VLB Stealth will be going in a 486 build later this year...
Very enjoyable pacing and cuts. Also, reparing graphics cards is a good niche for your channel, I'd say. And as Jaka said, it's a pleasure to watch and listen, too!
That feeling you describe when you fix a broken/faulty card is well known to me, and it translates well in your videos too - I definitely got some second-hand satisfaction when those artifacts disappeared. Great job.
You could improve the way you're using your wick. Note that it's a mesh. When you unroll it, press it together like you're trying to get out of a chinese finger trap, so it becomes wider and spreads out. This way it will load with way more solder, and it'll wick it up much more easily. This technique makes even the "cheap stuff" work pretty well.
@@Bewefau As solder is absorbed the colour will change from copper to grey/silver and that part of it will become very stiff. Once that happens you can just cut it off and use the fresh part again.
I repasted my Voodoo3 3500, and I was able to overclock it *LESS* afterwards. I used to be able to overclock it to 190, and it was crashing at about 186. It previously had a thermal pad like in your video. I noticed the springs 3DFX used to hold the heatsink to the card were really weak. I swapped them out for some different ones I pillaged from somewhere, and I was able to overclock it all the way up to 200mhz. You might get some stronger springs for the cards and see how that affects overclocking.
Great tip thanks. I noticed the springs are pretty weak too. Using nuts/bolts could be an option too as long as care is taken not to overtighten. Another thing I noticed (especially on card 1) was that the avenger chip's surface is FAR from flat. It's much higher at the perimeter than the center. You can kind of see what I mean in the photo I show where the heatsink is first removed. I needed to add way more paste than usual to make sure there was good contact with the heatsink.
@@vswitchzero What about sanding or lapping the chip, just like people used to lap CPU's? Lapped to the raw core and install a big phat copper based heatsink.
You have some of the best paced videos on RU-vid, you seem to know exactly when we've seen enough of a step and you can cut ahead and exactly when we want every detail shown. Love your videos and thanks for posting.
Your skills are fantastic! With passive cooling my Voodoo 3 3000 with 6ns memory overclocks to a maximum stable 188 mhz. With active cooling it goes up to 195 mhz. I wonder how high your cards with 5ns memory would go with active cooling, I guess probably up to 200 mhz or even more.
That's an excellent overclock with 6ns memory, that's for sure! Do you remember what brand of chips your card had? I did have a 92mm fan close to the card to provide some airflow during testing. I didn't try without active cooling during overclocking.
Depending how the addressing on the memory works you maybe can try to lower resolution and depth to see if the error changes or goes away so you can maybe now if its one of the first memory or the higher ones. just an idea.
@@vswitchzero there was this software to test ram memory years ago i dont remember the name ram doctor or something it displayed you on which pin the error occured and then you just trace this pin back to the memory ic. Maybe there is something for video cards too?
It's easy to love the repair videos. Seeing these retro cards, especially Voodoos, getting saved from the bin is extremely satisfying. Even the ones that don't turn out, they still had that hope, that chance. They didn't go down without a fight. To me, and many others, these are bits of history, not just old junk. Repairs, or reviews, I enjoy the channel. Always make sure you're doing what YOU want to be doing. I stick around because of enthusiasm and authenticity, regardless of the content. Keep it up either way, and keep your hobby something that makes you happy.
My launch Voodoo³ 3000 AGP developed severe artifacts that I was able to see during the boot process. I recall it being vertical red bars on the BIOS splash and text screens. 3Dfx (old logo!) RMA’d it for me and the replacement was another full retail sealed copy complete with a second mail-in offer for Unreal Tournament. They had corrected the strange misprinted Unreal disc that had Unreal Tournament art and some beta UT files for UnrealEd which I helped bring to the Unreal community many years later (2007).
Man, you are bringing back memories! I had a Voodoo3 3000 and played countless hours of Unreal Tournament! That card never gave me any trouble, though. I remember game supporting 3DFX Glide being so smooth at the time compared to Direct X
@@geoffmooregm I actually got a Diamond Monster Fusion Z100 (Voodoo Banshee) as a stop gap AGP card since my Voodoo³ 3000 AGP was still preordered when the Pentium III launched. Before then I’d only experienced software rendering… unless you count the ATi Rage II that literally ran Direct3D slower than the software renderer. When I first saw Unreal running on the Banshee with reflections and liquid-smooth frame rate I was totally blown away… and that was just a Banshee! I couldn’t believe what I had been missing out on. A month or so later I had my Voodoo³ 3000 AGP and I never looked back. It made games I’d already enjoyed a whole new experience (Quake, Quake II, Monster Truck Madness, etc).
Feels great knowing someone is out there saving these cards from the recycling centre. the only thing missing on the stickers is the date that you serviced the card.
When upgrading memory chips, you might have to upgrade the bypass capacitors as well. If the bypass caps were just on the border of being useable at that frequency.
@@vswitchzero yw. also bear in mind at some point the traces will not be matched in length and therefore higher speeds cannot be reached. this includes the bonding wires on the voodoo chip! so, you know, maybe if you have a very fast oscilloscope, and a measurement setup, and can build your own pcb, then maybe, just maybe, you'll be able to overclock more... heheh
My first job was working for my father's small business repairing business telephone equipment, so a lot of soldering.. Everything you said was spot on about ventilation, finer tip irons, and especially about the quality solder wick.. Would make all the difference. Quality stuff will ACTUALLY wick the solder right up like a paper towel sucking up water. Where the crappy stuff just smooshes it around and it kind of stick to it.
Love the repair stuff. Getting back into soldering myself after many years break from it, I have just been working with TH stuff, and biggest project so far was to assemble a SixtyClone / Commodore C64 clone. Next project will include SMD components (Denise board / sort of Amiga 500+ remake) . Will also create a Retro Chip Tester Pro. It will all be done with a soldering iron though, as I do not have a hot air station or have experience with hot air. So long story short, I use these videos to learn techniques and what to do and not do. :)
3:30 that’s one of the interesting things about my 1000. One is that it’s a OEM card without a heatsink and the other is that it has Siemens _SGRAM_ modules on it instead of SDRAM chips
Yeah it seems there are a few models that use SGRAM instead of SDRAM out there. I'm curious if there is any performance difference between them. I don't own any SGRAM V3s currently.
Awesome overclock! I'm sure the 3500s had higher binned cores too if I had to guess. The Hyundai memory seems to do better than some other brands (even the 6ns I have on one of my own V3s).
Interesting video, cool that another Voodoo 3 is alive :) Maybe i will try replace to this memory chips to overclock my Voodoo 3 3000 AGP, because my on 6ns (VG3617161DT) i can OC only to 177 Mhz.
great job on those card mods! and definitely consider drag soldering. you can practice on broken stuff till you get the hang of it and it's way, way easier and quicker once you do. also, it's necessary for some jobs like really fine pitch stuff you can't touch the legs one at a time
Thanks! I bought some additional tips for my iron that should be good choices for drag soldering. I have a couple of dead Geforce Mx200 cards that I hope to get some practice on 👍
I love your repair videos, they include some how to details that help a lot. I recently attempted my first SMD IC replacement and it was a success thanks to your tips. FWIW, it was a pair of ATS25 shortwave radios.
Maybe you should consider to glue off the heatsink on this MSI socket A motherboard. Because it's glued on 2-side tape and have no contact in the center of northbridge. There are holes to put there some other heatsink with spring-clips instead))
Small SMD electrolytic capacitors(less than 100uF) of that age are always bellow specs. I think that was the issue with the first card, not the memory. You should always start the troubleshooting replacing the capacitors.
I really enjoy the repair videos. You do a very good job of showing the troubleshooting, but not so much detail it gets boring. Keep the great content coming!
Good job, I wonder if using freezer spray on the ram chips one by one would of changed the artifacting in any way to of diagnosed which IC was at fault, used to be one of my ways of diagnosing set top boxes at work, they pretty much used a chip set in a similar way, i.e.a processor and ram, before SOCs were in everything ha.
Very interesting method! I would imagine this could work well as long as the freeze spray would be safe for the chips/PCB while the system is running. Thanks for sharing! 👍
My Voodoo 3 3000 16MB PCI stopped working a long time ago. It just displayed random gibberish on power up. I wish that I had kept my Rendition Verite V2200 8MB AGP, Creative RIVA TNT 2 16MB PCI, GeForce 3 64MB AGP, and my Radeon 9800 Pro stopped working years ago.
Hey Mike, I'm a new viewer of your youtube channel, and I really enjoy your videos, especially the repair videos. I recently ran across a trove of 90's hardware at the thrift store, and I picked it up so it wouldn't go to waste. I want to give it to a person doing retro hardware stuff on youtube, and I think you might fit the bill. It's mostly 486 and Pentium class processors, 72-pin SIMMs and 168-pin SDRAM DIMMs. Is that something you'd be interested in having? I can send pictures if that'll help.
So well captured, so well explained, so well done Mike, the technical commentary is perfect. Your repair videos are now valuable recourses in the retro GPU world, would not be surprised if some technical school teacher is using your videos as instructional tools in the future.
I wish Voodoo 3's weren't $250-$300 Canadian. I have Rage 128 Pro II, TNT2, G450 Dual Head, and a GeForce2 MX400. Guess I'll just have to save up for a bit.
Not surprised you were held back by the core even with the 200 MHz memory. Years ago, I had a 3500 and attached a fan to the heatsink and overclocked it. That card had 5ns RAM chips and reached 202 MHz stable, up from the stock 183. I suspect the cores on the 3500s were speed-binned and had a few more MHz of headroom in them, which is why you could only reach 191 on those 3000 cores even with 200 MHz memory.
Awesome stuff here. I never had a Voodoo 3. I was brainwashed by Nvidia at that point with the Riva TNT line. I had a Voodoo Banshee, but it aged very quickly. My friend had the Voodoo 3 3500 and I remember it being a beast at early Counter-Strike Beta.
Great video. Loved the 3DFx cards. Such a great leap in video technology and boost games. Personally brought a couple 3DFX cards new from Fry's Electronics when it first came out to play games. Got 2 3DFX cards for $10 at a yard sale. I believe they should work but never really test them out. So now I might look for them in the garage and test them out. Hopefully they work so I don't need to do all the crazy soldering and testing that you have to do.
Something I've found with a lot of V3's and also Trident cards, is that the majority of the time if a memory chip is having issues, it's always the one nearest the socket. Don't ask me why, it's just how it works. MOST of the time it's not even a bad chip either, it's bad joints where a simple reflow is all you need. Right now I'm in the middle of something similar trying to diagnose my Voodoo 5 5500.
Not surprising they topped out at 191, from memory, the Voodoo 3 ran pretty tight memory timings to reduce latency. The chips themselves might even have more headroom, especially with a fan cooler, if the memory was 233Mhz rated. That said, 191Mhz is nothing to sneeze at at all!
For identify adress of memory which is bad, use Video Memory Stress Test in Hirens Boot. Then, you need to figure somehow, to which chip the adress belongs. I dont know how, but you are still one step closer when you know adress, which is faulty.
I vaguely remember sticking a tiny fan on my voodoo3 2000 heatsink back in the day, also my case had a lot of 80mm fans lol Good work on the memory chip replacements!
@@vswitchzero I found a resistor array that had one dead connection and replaced it along with a missing resistor hoping that would be the issue, but I am still pretty much where I was.. could I ask you to please share the resources for the voodoo and voodoo2 which you have (maybe on your website?) regarding what all the pins on the FBI and TMU's are for? I am suspecting the TMU's arent getting power, but I need to know which pins to check.. thanks!
I wonder how hard it is to upgrade an old SDRAM videocard to use Static RAM instead. You would probably need to modify or bypass the memory controller.
Ah, I remember this card. I got one to play Freespace 2. It didn't have a fan cooler so sometimes it heated up and started showing distorted colors and polygons. So I bought a cheap cooler card to install above it that just blew air directly on to it. That did the trick.
Nice, but you really need to learn how to drag solder. Makes everything soo much easier. Trick is to have flux under and on top of the pins. Works for me at least. 👍
i think replace only damaged ram chip better than changing them all always old chipes have better quality and even it not, you can save the chipes you bought and not use them all in one day but anyway, really cool work man
A small tip for anyone repairing GPUs of any era: If a memory module is bad and you can't test it (modern cards using MATS or the AMD software), start with the module closest to the PCI/PCIe/AGP connector. Those tend to fail first due to the power draw and heat the connector generates.
Vswitch, love your videos man! Quick question, I have 2 Voodoo cards with their heatsinks epoxyed on to them. How does one safely remove them without damaging any chips below? Would love to hear your thoughts on this. Thanks again and keep up the great work 👍
Thanks very much! Most V2s didn't have heatsinks, were these done custom by someone? Personally, I'd leave them on unless its really necessary to remove them for some reason. If something like arctic thermal epoxy was used, it'll be REALLY strong. Thankfully the V2 chips aren't BGA so less chance of trouble as long as the pins are protected. I know a lot of people swear by the freezing method, which seems to help with glue/epoxy but its still risky. If you search for Voodoo 5 heatsink removal, you'll see some examples. I've never tried personally, so proceed with caution. Good luck!
@vswitchzero Thank you for the reply. Yes, both my Creative Labs Voodoo 2's came with custom heatsink/fan combos put on by the previous owner. unfortunately, they were a bit of a noob and put them backwards! I'd love to show you a picture if I could. It's incredible how someone could get this so wrong 😄
Suggestion. To save on parts put the first chip into the second swap and so on. One bad chip is replaced using two new chips in the end. In this case you used five rare parts.
Somebody should make an FPGA video card that can emulate all of the different 3D accelerator cards from the DOS era, complete with all of their different proprietary APIs
This was awesome. Being able to solder surface mount chips is a very valuable skill to have! Someday I would like to learn it myself. Great job fixing these Voodoo 3s.
Thanks very much! :) .. I had pretty much zero soldering skill a couple of years ago. Just takes practice and patience. If you've got a crappy old dead video card or something you can use to practice on, that's always a great way to learn. Thanks again!
Just found your channel (no idea why YT recommended it tho!). Awesome! Excellent all around: great sound (very important!), great video, great speaker! Great work, too, on the soldering, not that I know much about that. :) I have tons of retro hardware that NEVER gets used (I live in a sml apt so there's no room), INCLUDING one of those Voodoo 3 cards, which USED TO BE my PRIZE possession! Mine is one of the Dell OEM cards (or one of those PC maker OEM cards). It worked GREAT when I used it MANY years ago, but who knows now. I didn't really know what I was doing 'back in the day,' but I DO remember overclocking the memory and being tickled pink about the increase! Anyway, thx for the great work/video! Cheers, mate!
