3Dfx Voodoo Powered Motherboard Gets a Memory Upgrade!  

Thanks! I only recently got into these more brazen hardware mods. It's a bit addictive, not gonna lie, and it doesn't help that both of these types of chip replacement mods I've got on video have resulted in huge performance gains. Fortunately I've advanced in my soldering skills to a point that I was more worried about trashing the RAM sockets because of how close they were to the one memory chip than actually messing up the motherboard itself. I figured worst case I could just put the original memory back. I spent years trying to find a 16MB version of this board and, well, I don't have to anymore!

@@DKJones96 sure, when you know what you are doing it's kind of safe and "easy", but still remarkable I'd say, given the type of hardware! Ah, the all-red caps are very cool 😎

Thanks! I wasn't quite expecting such a huge jump in actual gaming but the results speak for themselves for sure.

So nice being able to actually mod it! The skill required to swap out parts on a modern motherboard or video card is much higher than this.

Ahh great! Glad to hear another one got the mod! Crazy that they even sold it with 8MB but I guess that's par for the course for OEM stuff.

For this particular motherboard it definitely had going for it that there was a 16MB model, even if I couldn't find one to see what the resistor settings would have been. That would have saved a couple days of thinking for sure. I went ahead and made a couple of slides that show the jumpers I ultimately changed in the description. It ended up being only 1 resistor move and the removal of a jumper and installation of two more. I don't expect many people will undertake this upgrade but it's good to have the info out there.

So memory is the main reason why intergrated graphics is usually few levels below their "regular" counterparts? Not sure if I ever will have to chance to use this knowledge, but it's good to know nonethleless...

Thanks! 👍

Thanks! It can definitely be hard to find a decent balance. I left quite a bit of footage on the cutting room floor because my yammering didn't really accomplish anything moving the video forward and there was already 4 minutes of talking at the beginning. I feel like I could have used a bit more of the benchmarks(it is the fun part after all) but my Windows XP capture machine is in need of some TLC apparently as it fought me by refusing to boot without a BSOD until the system was warm every time.

Thank you very much!

I have my limits for sure but I did fix a Voodoo 1 by taking a Dremel to the chip where some pins had broken off and soldering some tiny wires to the leads inside the plastic chip package. imgur.com/hvEiURv Cheers!

@@DKJones96 You and that dude from necroware, truly knows your voodoo stuff :)

Thanks!

Thanks man! That Rose's Alloy trick would have been nice here!

Sure, but you managed again very well even without this. You are very skilled with this! I admire skilled people.

Me chips?

Thank you! You know, I don't think I've ever actually seen what the original PB tower looks like. All I could even find online was photos and videos of a build someone did with the motherboard shown here and not the actual OEM build.

I wish. It turns out that even with the most up to date BIOS this board just doesn't support Tualatin chips, contrary to what I've read online. To get 1.2GHz I will have to overclock a 100MHz bus model coppermine. Shockingly, they offered up to 1GHz in the 100MHz models so in theory you should be able to attain 1.33GHz if you can eek that out of your sample. I, unfortunately, don't have one of them. From what I can tell this board just can't do the lower voltages required by the Tualatin models.

You know, I never thought about that but that is missing! I'll have to make sure I include that for my next chip replacement video.

Oh, yeah it was hard to convey in the video, if you look at the video description I posted a link to the final changes for the resistors. They are images but tell the whole story will enough. Hope the mod goes well! Let me know if you have any other questions!

@@DKJones96 thanks for replying. Yes. The images are great. I was wondering the temp you used in hot air station, because removing the ram from the Matrox I ripped off a pad... Don't want that to happen with the motherboard... I used a lot of flux but looks like they were really well attached... That had never happened to me

Thank you very much! I want to install a Tualatin 1.2GHz but I can't get it to post with that so I'm back at 1.0GHz Coppermine. I'm going to try a BIOS update on it and hope that works. I've talked to a person on eBay that services these boards and he says they run just fine. We will see. As for RAM, it has 512MB installed now. Doesn't sound like much these days but even 256MB was plenty for what I'm doing. That being said, I found 2x 256MB Crucial CAS2 PC-133 RAM sticks and really wanted to use them to top the machine off.

@@DKJones96 Well coincidences like this are strange indeed; a 16mb MSI MS-6168 Ver.2 came up for sale yesterday, and I bought it. I've been looking for any 6168 for a while, I wasn't even aware of the 16mb version, and the day after watching your video I find one. Whatever strings you pulled for me, thanks lol! When it arrives I'll send you the ram chip part numbers. They'll probably be the same, but who knows with 90's video cards? Every voodoo 2 I own has different memory.

@@phillycheesetake I watched that auction! In the photos it looked to be the same Samsung part numbers as best I could tell. If you let me know though I will add them to my info here if they are different. That board also has the normal front panel connector which is really nice. Have fun with that thing, it's a rare gem indeed!

@@DKJones96 I noticed the front panel header and Conexant TV-out chip, glad to have both. The board has everything except front USB, which maybe for completeness I'll add, but I hesitate to modify collectable hardware for vanity reasons. If there's evidence that this board as configured sometimes came with it, then sure. I'll let you know on those chips, happy #GPUJune!

@@phillycheesetake When it comes to the USB connector, don't bother... 2 reasons. It's USB 1.1 so it's slow as molasses and it's only one port. The way they do it is a jumper by the PCI slots(J16) deactivates one of the rear ports and connects it to the front. It's way nicer to just get a USB 2.0 PCI card with an internal connector and use that. Plus, that USB connector is a non-standard pinout so you have to modify a standard one to fit. The TV out is a nice feature but I've found it is undocumented so you have to find out what the pinout is(the conexant TV chip connects to the header that is between the ATX power input and the processor socket and it's called J17). On mine, for some reason, when I switch on the TV out I end up with a very dark RGB output but the S-video is fine. Curious if yours does the same! If it does it might explain why it is undocumented. I have the pinout somewhere but it was easy to figure out. It's an S-video output and the pins can be traced back to it just like they can be on a Voodoo card and it will give you what is what if you compare them.

I was a bit but after doing some other soldering I was more confident in my skills. The chips were a bit more difficult to get to on the motherboard than on the graphics card but that shouldn't matter too much if you kinda know what you are doing. In my 386SX to 486SLC video the soldering went fine and if I had botched that I definitely wouldn't have tried this one!

@@DKJones96 nice i wish i could solder good.

@@wowitsshit9734 we all have to start somewhere!

To do this I would need to find a Slot 1 or Socket 370 motherboard and buy some AGP Voodoo cards. I only have PCI Voodoo expansion cards anymore due to previous frustrations with AGP compatibility when a PCI card will work in almost anything with a PCI slot and it's only a small performance penalty. As it stands, the AGP Voodoo 3 2000 on this motherboard is faster than the PCI version in this same motherboard when they both have 16MB of VRAM. It's not a huge difference as the Voodoo card doesn't take advantage of any of the special AGP features but the data throughput of AGP is twice that of PCI so you get a bit of a bump. In fact, that fast transfer rate is probably why the pre-mod 8MB setup held its own as well as it did.

@@DKJones96 If it's true (Not that I'm questioning your experience), then 3dfx had perfect way to increase their presence in OEM market. Too bad they had to make almost all board manufacturers their direct competitor by aquisition of STB. One more reason why we should consider this entire deal main reason of 3dfx's downfall.

@@TurboMMaster I don't know that I would say STB was the entire reason but it didn't help. There are tons and tons of STB Voodoo cards out there and the Voodoo 3 sold like hot cakes at the time but there is an argument to be made that the Riva TNT and Rage 128 got a substantial bump from card makers during a crucial time for 3Dfx. I think either way their demise was inevitable when they got caught with their pants down on the GeForce 256 release. The 256s integrated T&L and the VSA-100s high cost really bit them and there wasn't any way for them to recover from that set-back.

Yes, the timedemo is a VGA capture from this system. Processor was a P3 Coppermine at 900MHz and the GPU was at stock 143MHz. I run it at 1.2GHz now(9x 133MHz bus) and the GPU is at 166MHz. It sped the benchmarks up with both the GPU and CPU speed up so there is possibly more that can be eeked out if I really wanted to.

What resolution were you running for those fps numbers in quake 3? 42.9fps to 62.4fps with the memory upgrade? Also, any noteable graphics settings in the game that I should take note of? Thanks! 🤙

Ahh man. F. Being in vintage computing we inevitably run into those and it sucks big time. I've currently got a Voodoo 2 project going where I'm having to grind back the chip plastic to make new legs for them and whew is it driving me nuts. The card got some sort of chemical on it that attacked it pretty badly.

I have noticed that the foil will get warm and melt stuff. I'm picking up some wide kapton tape that I can use for masking stuff like this. Thanks for the info!

The 440-series chipset on this motherboard has AGP support and the Voodoo is directly tied to that.

@@DKJones96 That's such a cool piece of tech! An onboard V3! How did I not even know they existed? Ha. Cool videos by the way. Been watching a lot some very interesting ones. Thanks.

Oh no! It might not be getting power if that's the case which can be a good thing. Semiconductors like to fail shorted so if it was getting really hot with nothing the chip needs replaced but it's much easier to work on an external part like a regulator. The Voodoo card needs about 2.75V so it will have its own power regulator on the board. I would have to pull mine out of the case to try and find out which one it is but I imagine if you fired it up, ran it for a few minutes, and then shut it down you could feel around for the bad regulator as it would be cold compared to the others on the board. I've thought of messing with this regulator to adjust voltage since the 3500 runs about 3V at 183MHz so to get that kind of overclock stable most Voodoo 3s will need to see a slight bump. I decided against it but the card definitely has its own power regulator. If the regulator needs replaced you'll definitely need a board pre-heater and a good heat gun those FETs are really soldered on there.

The motherboard should have both TMUs running as it is just a V3 2K onboard. You can check it using the mojo utility if you download and install the 3dfx SDK package that can be found online. It'll report to you exactly what the GPU is seeing.

Not always possible but it was here! I really didn't want to mess up this motherboard and I'm glad it came out so well in the end. Still using it!

I have a photo gallery in the description that gives a visual of the hardware jumper changes. imgur.com/gallery/LAt1McR On this board, Chip Select is normally attached to the Bank 0 output on the GPU in the 8MB configuration. Fairly normal but kind of unnecessary since there is only ever one bank! I can only guess that there are problems if you drive an output like that with no load so they did this as a way to prevent it. What I end up doing for this upgrade is grounding chip select on the SGRAM and Bank 0 output goes to Address line 11. Toggling the address line on the module looks like a second bank to the GPU which uses the rest of the address lines as usual so we get 16MB. Typically you will have 2MB SGRAM modules on a Voodoo 3 card and it isn't really setup for using 4x 4MB modules. Kind of cool how they worked that out. I think only one model of 16MB AGP cards run 4x 4MB as well.