Repairing the Legendary 3dfx Voodoo 5 5500! 

Nothing is more satisfying is to see how someone brings a new life to a broken thing. Thanks for your dedication!

Your perseverance is inspiring! Pretty great you were able to bring this one back, and the population of working V5 5500s grows by one. :D

That's incredibly cool that you got it working! You're right; there's nothing like the satisfaction of fixing it yourself. Congrats!

i remember when those cards were announced but i never got my hands on one. i rocked the voodoo 3 for a long time.

Ah, Voodoo. I still have a working 16MB Voodoo Banshee. I loved the Voodoo line.

Just subbed to this channel after watching the Voodoo 3 repairathon, now I'm hooked. Very slick presentation, production and an easy watch. Can already tell this channel is on the up.

This reminds me on my electronics classes in high school. Teacher had a handful of systems from 80s 90s 00s for us to diagnose and repair. Component level repair on pcbs was only tought up to early 90s boards. Limited micro soldering and smd components.

Nice. Had a voodoo 5500 as a kid. It was a family pc. The number of hours blown away on that system playing quake 3, unreal, the sims was a peak era of my childhood. Now the card resides in my grandmas pc where she uses it to play bridge lol... never had the heart to ask her to let me swap it out. She's had it for almost 20 years.

Goodness. I'm sitting on a goldmine. I found my 5500 in its original box that I put away in my surplus cupboard years ago. I should throw together some old PC components and see if it still works. No reason to think it wouldn't unless those caps are prone to deteriorate over time. I feel some retro time coming on.

This was the GPU that solidified my love for PC gaming. It made Unreal and Unreal Tournament look amazing back then (which were my favorite games). I was sick when 3DFX went out of business, I tried to keep it up to date with 3rd party drivers but eventually succombed when nVidia released the Geforce 4 Ti4200 which I used till the FX series launched.

John Wick is a magic tool :)) (greetings to Ontario from Czech Republic)

Wahoo! 1k! Keep it Up Awesome Choice for the Milestone

Dude it's a VOODOO!! 🍿🔥

Wow! Great work on reviving the V55. This card transformed my gaming back in 2000 - I used to play Janes Longbow 2 with it and before/after was night/day. I still have the card in its original box, it is one of those things I'll never use again but never part with either.

I remember this card being announced and I couldn’t wait. Picked it up shortly after it’s release date. Damn good card. I only wish the the VooDoo 5 6000 would’ve gotten released.

I had this card back in the day, it was a beast

I was just thinking the other day... I wish I had a channel I can watch that has all the tools and motivation for repair but has no idea what they are doing like me... And here you are my new friend!

Good Job . The legend came back to life🤩

I had the Voodoo 5500 PCI version. I think I had it around 1999-2000? Cost me £199.99. Great card at the time but once I’d swapped to a GeForce 2 64Mb the difference was incredible! The GeForce was AGP so that may have helped as well. The biggest difference was the explosions and wall damage in Red Faction.

1 year later and you now have 13.4k subscribers 🙂 I enjoy your video's with repairs. thankyou so much 🙂

adding a good liquid flux to the pins makes removing solder bridges on fine-pin footprints very easy

Great repair job! If I can give a tip, use pre-cut short pieces of solder wick. This way it'll much easier to remove (old) solder as no heat from the iron will travel up the solder wick spool and get lost 😉 Also you might consider investing in a micro soldering station with those small knife edge like soldering tips for easier soldering of those fine pitch IC pins.

Man, I can't quite define what it is, but there's something so cosy for me about the Windows 2000 look ... I used to be able to spend ages just moving the mouse around and enjoying the shadow! That background shade too!

this is the best retro computer video I've ever seen

that 3dmark footage at the end, on frame rates a bit shy of what my geforce2 used to get, triggered a chain of memories. good times.

had a 3000 pci and always wanted the 5000 but had no agp port and couldn't afford one at the time. was gutted when they went bust, such good cards for their time

i've got one of these cards(since new, decades ago) in storage i've been wanting to break out and see if it'll work or not on a ultimate 2000's retro build. damn it was a sad day watching @3dfx #3dfx go down in flames, I still remember the day i bought this card and i was so stoked to finally have a semi high end card for a change.

I have a small tech channel myself and it is very encouraging to see other small channels growing in the Wild Wild West (www) of RU-vid. I loved your repair video and ofc I did subscribe. Keep it up.

Great work, it always pays out to be patient and keep working on a problem

How awesome was that! Amazing detail and good eye to catch those problems. Now this can be applied to every old rebuild.

thanks for preserving gaming history mate excellent work

I have the same behavior on a FX 5700U...your video inspired my to fix that card !! thanks

Im so glad so se that there are peps that still loves this old cards. It warms my nerdy heart. Thank you for the great video and keep up the great work you do.

MadOnion - what a blast from the past. I remember those benchmarks looking incredible!

What memories.... I now kick myself getting rid of all computer parts!! I had closet full parts from 386 to socket 7

This video is absolute shock for me. Must pull this card out of the pile and keep it somewhere safe...

I owned one of these. I threw it out about four years ago. The things you find when clearing your Tech closet out.

Congratulations on your +1K subs! I can honestly say that your videos are very satisfying to watch. The fact that you’re also very satisfied by the results of your work, makes the videos perfect. Thanks for that!

Thats a great job on the repair and awesome perseverance to keep going at it. The old retro hardware can really test your patience sometime. Plus it's great to see another iconic card brought back to life and working again. I hope we get to see it in a future build sometime!

Great job! Definitely worth saving this card!

Awesome seeing someone putting such passion into original hardware. I have started collecting a few little pieces of older hardware from my youth, though no Voodoo cards. This makes me think I should save the remaining Voodoo cards for people like you rather than just putting old cards in a display.

Thanks for such experience!

A tip for soldering SMDs : Tin all the pads before placing the chip, aligning might be a bit harder, but all you have to do is secure 2 pins to keep it locked up then you can drag your iron without any solder in it, the soldier thats in the pads will do the job, i would apply gentle pressure on top of the chip just to make sure it all remains solid while dragging. Having a knife type tip helps, then all you have to do is nudge test the pins once you're done.

Great video! Nicely done and great teaching and sharing style! Looking forward to future videos.

i saw that solder bridge immidiately as you showed the finished chip, it was clearly visible

It's funny how many of us have this same exact problem. I guess I need to get off my rear and try this on my V5.

Kudos for honesty and insights. GG

Great job there, well done so satisfying fixing stuff and getting a bargin. Before moving in to IT and programming, my first job from higher education was a digital bench technician, I was already quite familiar with soldered before starting that job, but really got to hone my skills. Two tips i can think of, if you want to get better at drag/wave soldering, if your current iron will take it, buy a tip with a well, a small dimple on the lower angled very end. Weller probably make the best, they are smooth so don't catch and bend pins and the dimple is like a reservoir of soldier as you move along the pins of the component. I always found it easier to tack one end pin like you did, but use that to then align them chip, don't worry there plenty of give to move the chip ic around without snapping the tacked pin, it just gives you one less angle to worry about. The other is a really nice pair of tweezers, with a very fine end for smd components, maybe one straight and one curved. Only ever use them for smd work and keep them pristine, stored in a box as once they are bent its very hard to get them back and your tiny smd part will ping off when trying to grip them. Speaking of, a really nice pair of tweezers should allow you to confidently pick up a 0603 resistor even a 0402, place is where it needs to be while still griping it and tack one side, so you don't have to use the sticky flux. Using your little finger on the pcb to steady your hand try to get to the point where you can just pickup the component without letting go to push it around trying to line it up and line it up while gripping but as I say without quality correct tweezers this impossible. Hope you don't think I'm trying to be a know it all, I'm way out of practice but I can still see it in my head how to approach things but know what worked, and there's a reason those techniques were taught to us. At the end of the day though you use what you have and improvise and I have to say you did really well aligning the smds and memory ics.

That's awesome! You've almost inspired me to pick up a soldering iron and start playing with some older parts from my stash... almost.. lol. Grats on 1K! I hit that mark a few months ago. It's a great feeling :)

Sorry you had to go through all of that but im so glad there were so many problems for the video. Nice job on the repair!

Really enjoyed this! Thanks mate!

Amazing work!!! What a beast!

Nice fixes, well worked. Good luck with the channel.

I still have my original voodoo5 5500! Man I played the hell out of Tribes back then with it.

Great video Mike, glad things are going well. Well done project here, super cool you got it working. In my head, this is still an unattainable high end GPU of amazement. Nice digital magnifier.

That's a really cool card. Interesting piece of history.

Very underrated , keep working love ur work...

wow love your video i still have those voodo 3dfx cards, the voodoo2, banshee, and voodoo 3 im still looking for all models

Congratulations to 1K subs! Great job!

Hugeee effort bro congratz amazing job!!

I still have one of these that I bought new at the time. This card smoked just about everything on the market at the time, and the anti-aliasing was truly remarkable. Got it home, and discovered my power supply wasn't up to the task, but with a new PSU I got a few years of enjoyment from the card. Great repair job - congrats on many new subscribers!

Such a great video. I had one of these cards brand new back in the day and then Voodoo went under- so it sat around until I ditched it- very disappointing looking back; I should have kept it. So glad you persevered; you deserved this win !

Wow! What a magnificent job you produced on that board. I loved. 👑👑👑 Uau! Que trabalho magnífico você produziu nessa placa. Adorei.

The amount of problems with this card is incredible!! Great work on the perseverance and repair of the card!

Excellent video. You did a great job with telling the story of fixing the card. As for your soldering skills, you did just fine. 👍

Know I see as 3.4k . KEEP UP THE GREAT WORK!

Nice job man! Was on the edge of my seat the whole time..

Its a really cool card. If only i got one before the prices went through the roof. The dream tho would be one of those remade voodoo cards (shaman?) It's amazing and if only i had the money i would buy it in a heartbeat.

Nicely done sir.

EPIC video man. KEEP M COMING

WoW I think I still have a voodoo 5 and 3 board back in may parents home, didn't know they got this pricy oO

Nice work. And that second memory replacement wasn't a waste. You said yourself you'd improved your skills, so it was great follow-up practice if nothing else. Also, drag soldering seems to be easier on newer boards. Better solder mask maybe, and no corrosion? That, and a new, small wedge tip combined with generous flux and finding a "good" tip temperature (if you have the option) can really help.

As an "experienced" solderer, good job! One tip I learned during my IPC7711 training was to prior to laying down your SMD component, put solder on one of the pads and then put your component down and melt the solder:)

I had no doubts that you would have find the problem by touching the card 🤣 Congrats for the 1K and keep it up!

Great job!

I bet the original owner, who "wasn't able" to test this card, is so mad right now. haha! Totally makes it worth it.

Really interesting video, Glad you fixed it. (subbed)

I'm the original owner of the PCI version of this card. It worked the last time I tried it about 5-6 years ago. I still have a lga775 motherboard it should work in. Keep saying I'm going to dig it out and try it.

Best card in my retro collection of about 60 cards. I'm glad that repair videos are showing up on youtube, so if mine ever fails, then I'll know how to troubleshoot. Back in the day I went with Matrox, because that's what my older brother used. He had the 1st gen. I got the G200, because rumors were going around about 3DFX going out of business. Then TNT2 blew everyone out of the water. Anyway, I have all Voodoo's up to 5500, but nothing matches it. I try going easy on the fans, so that I can keep the originals as long as possible. Almost thinking of getting a dead card or at least he processors to keep as spares for that inevitable day when something fails to boot up. Retro used to be fun. Just involved collecting cheap recyclable items. Now it's like treasure hunting.

Amazing fix

Fantastic vid! Just found you randomly. I have a 5500 coming in from eBay I bought cheap that has a broken fan blade on one of the vga coolers. So that'll be ... fun. I'm going to put aftermarket heatsinks over each chip and then have a large fan cooling the two mounted above them. I'm hoping the rest of the card works as he says it does.

I was clapping when fixed :)

Very cool video! When I was last at my parents' house in 2017 I founded my old Voodoo 5 5500 AGP card, but I didn't bring it home with me as I had so many other retro gaming finds there that I needed to fit in my suitcase.😅 I have an old 440BX motherboard with a P3 700MHz and 384 MB of SDRAM. I've been thinking of putting Windows 98SE on it and making it a retro gaming late 90's and earlier PC gaming machine. I wonder if my card still works. It worked when I took it out, but it's been sitting for years untested.

Great tenacity. Great work.

You're right to recap the card. 80s and 90s SMD electrolytics are notorious for seal failure and leaking. What's insidious about SMD electrolytics is that the base of the cap will wick the leaked electrolyte and keep it under the cap, keeping the problem hidden a lot longer than a normal radial or axial cap. I've had to recap all of my Voodoo cards because of leaking SMD electrolytics, as well as tons of other electronics from the era with SMD caps.

I'm somewhat of a beginner myself as well on soldering. But i found that if i absolutely soak the board on flux, the dragging works and i have no blobs/bridges. And even if i get bridges, again soaking it in flux makes it magically disappear when touched with iron. But as you, i'm also probably doing it wrong, but this has so far worked for me.

you can check vcc and gnd of memory chips if its grounded with a multitester to narrow down the bad memory. by looks of it the previous owner has a shorted to ground problem when you pointed out that worked on filter capacitor at the beginning of this video.

I remember playing EverQuest on that GPU, with the GLide API and the AA on it looked great. Had the 5500 AGP version of it, was a great card eventually replaced it with a Geforce2 Ultra 64 down the road.

From 1k subs, to 3.3k subs. You are going well 😄

Just found your channel and I'm really enjoying the content. A recommendation to add to your tools, a 12w precision iron. Personally I've always used the Antex 12w. It makes working with smd components where you have to use an iron childsplay, far far easier. 👍

I see a pattern here... I also announced the 1000th subs a few weeks ago and since then I got about the same subs you have now. I see YT algorithm has worked the same for us! :) It's well earned though, your videos are of very high quality, and there is a lot shown in a short time. I like your techniques and the fact you're not shy in showing your mistakes, from which we all learn about. I am no expert in electronics and I am also learning on my way so I am aware that my techniques might not be the most elegant. I see a bit of myself in your troubleshooting - but I cannot match your English! :) I'm glad I found your channel, well done!

Nice repair!

dude, that is awesome that you were able to fix that board! I wish I could learn how to do that. hopefully you have some how to solder guides on your channel for me to check out!

I had a Voodoo 3 3000. I had to change the thermal paste and adapt a cooler on the heatsink. TOP plate. It ran Unreal and Raibow 6 - Rogue Spear excellently!

Super Karta Graficzna z czasów gdzie królowała firma 3dfx VooDoo 5 5500 to była oficjalna karta która dawała niezłego kopa jak na tamte czasy pojawiły się też wersja 6000 i 9000 Ale to były już konstrukcje prywatne miłośników podrasowanie sprzętu

Good for you, bud.

Nice one sir

wow great job

i subscribed today, i discovered this channel thanks to the youtube algorithm, congratulations on your +1K subs

its was a great time...pc and console gaming was very boring until some come out with a 2nd Card that u have to put into your pc! it was a Voodoo 1 Card with 4MB and it was the best you can do for gaming! rich people used Matrox Mystque Cards, that are very powerful and expensive too, but with bad gaming capabilities! with this "Voodoo" card u could use even the slowest ATI Rage Cards or even S3 card and put a 250-300$ Voodoo card in your rig and Boom!! you have the best gaming experience u can get in late 90s!