The 3dfx Voodoo 3 3000 Repairathon! 

God I miss those days. Way back when I got my hands on a Voodoo 3 2000 for Christmas. My first ever 3D accelerator card. It was such a mind blowing experience! Years of gaming with software rendering suddenly going to glide? Oh man... such nostalgia. That Voodoo3 2000 was such a trooper too. I played with it all the way until I was playing HL Counter Strike before my friend gave me his old GeForce2 MX card. Wasn't a massive upgrade but it played Counter Strike just fine and better than the Voodoo so I was happy. I still had that card all the way up until 5 years ago when I lost everything in a house fire. Ah well... good times and good memories. Those I cant lose.

A bought a fully working one of these a couple of years ago when the prices weren’t stupid. Very pleased with it

Wow that's lucky! I've gotten lucky in the past but it's quite something to have 100% success.

Not surprised about the dirty contacts on the 2nd card, I had a similar problem with a ASUS 370 DL slotket. I cleaned the contacts twice with ipa and it didnt work, cleaned it with contact cleaner and still didnt work, I finally grabbed a good art eraser and used it to clean the contacts and the card came to life and worked perfectly after that. An art eraser has improved many a card.

I kept my voodoo3 3000 I bought in 1999 :) Still have it in my original P3 computer :)

Good old Days! 1999 i got my Voodoo 3 3000......awesome feeling with mit 12years :D

Oh man. I used to love my Voodoo 3 card. Was running on that for a long time.

Just found your channel! Man, I would have killed for one of these in middle school. Seeing the adverts in PC Gamer and all the cool games, oof, good times.🎉

Omg. That is my first ever dedicated gaming GPU that I ever bought. Great memories. Had to deal with figuring out drivers shortly after the company collapsed in 2001. Running GTA 3 was a nightmare. Was the only reason I had to switch. to an Nvidia.

Nicely Done! A 12MB voodoo 2 would be awesome. Imagine doing SLI with x2 12MB Voodoo 2's? Gotta Love the Voodoo 3's though. Great all around card for 1999-2000 games!

very nice troubleshooting there, I actually reacted when you did not get any beep codes on the first card so it was a brilliant idea to use a second card. I actually got one of these cards myself along with a Voodoo 3 PCI, a Voodoo1 and one Voodoo 2 card as well. I like these too

Oh that unforgettable PATA hard drive sound!

Voodoo 3 AGP was my first 3D graphics card. I was stoked when I finally got a computer with a 3D accelerator as we called it back in the day. Games ran SO smooth with it. I am really happy you were able to save these.

Oooo these were high end, like $250. I could not afford that, I could only buy the 2000 for $100 in the day. Great card, smoked my ATI Rage 3D. Scary I still remember that but not what I had for breakfast yesterday.

The cardinal rule for all those doing electronic repair/servicing work.....always make sure you have a good supply of quality coffee on hand.

Very interesting hint with two monitor support! Thanks!

Awesome work, Mike! Love your dedication!

Great imagination (plus a good luck). I remember a decade ago I saw a new/boxed Voodoo 5 for around $300, but I passed on. Why would I pay that much for a GF2 MX level.... Recently an STB black Voodoo 2 12mb, new/open box, was sold for $165.

Excellent video, great job !

Congratulations on resurrecting all 3 cars! I was a VooDoo2 & VooDoo3 fan when they were new. I wasn't able to afford a VooDoo4 and before I knew it 3dfx was no more. I mourned the death of 3Dfx and right or wrong still occasionally think about what an amazing graphics landscape we would have if they had not failed. Again, congratulations on 3 working cards! I hope the other 2 found great homes!

Excellent work, thank you for passing on some knowledge on repair methods!

Good old days 😍

Amazing work! Glad you fixed all of them! 👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻

My all time favorite graphics card was my Voodoo 3 3000 AGP. This video was like a trip down memory lane for me. Good job!

I remember being super chuffed when I sold my old Voodo3 that had been sat in my drawer for like 18 years for £45 when I saw how much they were going for... just checked again and they're like £130.

That's really awesome that you got all three cards working. Love the video and great job.

You have a great coffee machine Mike! Great content dude, glad I remembered to stop by here, this is a great retro GPU resource. The V3 3000 is one of my all time favorite cards. Well done btw, you are a wizard with these old cards.

What a nice little video, really enjoyed watching you go about fixing each card. I like the laid back style and the little coffee montages in between!

Great job saving these three incredible pieces of history!

Wow, what a fantastic outcome! Fantastic to see three iconic 3dfx cards being given a new lease of life You do a great job and filming and narrating your videos in a natural way. Keep it coming, you’ve got a bright future ahead of you on RU-vid

Still remember my original Voodoo card with it’s pass through setup. Was so cool at the time.

Excellent video. I have a Voodoo 3 and if I ever have problems with it this video has given me the confidence to attempt to diagnose it. Your channel; deserves to grow very quickly- very professional.

Another great video, nice work on the fixes. The Dell card behaving like that was very strange, nicely figured out!

Wow, I've been doing these kinds of repairs on Voodoo3, Banshee and other cards like these for the last ~7 years. So awesome to see someone else doing this! It looks like we use a lot of the same methods... but some of yours are definitely better! I have probably revived 50+ dead or defective cards, but after watching just a few of your videos I have definitely learned some things. Also, I catch myself fist-pumping when you have success, because I have been there and it feels so awesome to bring something back from the dead like that. Keep it up! :)

Congrats! And thanks for sharing your knowledge. This sure will help others to rescue their cards.

Great job as usual! I would keep them all, but I'm a Storage Engineer, I can't escape the "more copies you have of something unreplicable, the better" mindset 😄

I'd like to file an official complaint. I came here for some vintage card repair and now I'm finding myself jittering from 3 cups of coffee I wasn't planning on having! :D

Wow, nice haul dude! First time viewer here and now subscribed. I fancy myself as a PC guy but I confess I would have never have tried the fixes you came up with. Very cool

Thank you for a very informative video.

Excellent video! Three Voodoo3s revived which would´ve otherwise most likely get scrapped, love it!

Nice videos, I like the way you explain all the things!!! Thanks

I went with the Geforce 256 SDRAM model instead. GLide was on its way out, and I was playing Unreal Tournament competitively, and dipping my feet in Q3A. Love your channel man, punches me in the feels and kicks me in the nostalgia.

Brilliant video, excellent results!!!

Fantastic work! Love your vids and narration. Sometimes it's the simple things. Btw, 2 vids in now, you've convinced me to sub!

Great work 👌👍

That's awesome, three out of three!! I've got a 12MB Voodoo 2 with 110MHz RAM that I've tried to fix repeatedly. It's got damaged pins on the FBI chip so realistically it needs that chip removed and replaced but the pitch is so fine! It's scary.

I'd love to get a voodoo 3 for my 98 build they are so expensive to get nowadays.

nice video, so much to see in just 20 minutes!

very nice troubleshooting methodology, nice to see a triple win!

Thanks for the vid, i´m having 7 Voodoos sitting in a Showcase for half an eternity and i tested them all today....ami bios on all cards: 1x long 8x short and i hope its just the bios, they worked fine as i tested them the last time... (no optical anomalies visible) PS: one subscriber +

I got a 3dfx Voodoo³ 3000 AGP at launch and it had a strange misprinted Unreal disc (Unreal Tournament art) and some beta UnrealEd assets on the disc. The card died months later with vertical lines in the screen… can’t recall if they were blue or red but I think it was one of those two. I RMA’d it with 3dfx and the replacement came in a full retail box with a proper Unreal disc.

even tho i never used one of those i can only imagine the joy they brought to people that used, getting one of those at the time i imagine it is like you having a gtx 1050 and getting a rtx 3050, just a big change in what you can play!

Congrats! Great luck on all 3 (although the 3rd one was odd). Had the original Voodoo, Voodoo 2 (12MB) and Voodoo 3000. Loved them. I can't remember for sure if I got the Voodoo 5500 (my memories are mixed). That original Voodoo revolutionized graphics. From Tomb Raider 1 to GL Quake, to a many other GLIDE games, it was a real revolution. I was really saddened that morning when I saw 3DFX went belly up and Nvidia got all the IP. What is SAD is that I don't even know what I did with those boards--I fear I may even have just thrown them away at some point.

I also have one with the 1.0 GPU BIOS version. We could say it's one of the first ones.

Great stuff! Luckily I got my hands on a V3 3000 for 65€ and a 2000 for 50€ recently, I think it was in 2021. Having had a 3000 like you back in the day, I really had to have one for my Windows98 Retro machine.

Out of all the video cards I've owned over the last 25+ years, my old Voodoo 3 3000 was always my favourite. Bought a working one a couple of years ago, which was a good thing as prices have jumped up a notch since then. I must resist the urge to check the version number of its bios...

This vid helped me bring back a Geforce2 GTS. I got that card in a box of junk. It seemed to POST fine (good beep and boot to Windows), but without a VGA signal at all, not even during POST. With an additional PCI VGA, I could see the card showing up in WinXPs device manager with the correct name, but showing error 10 "device failed to start". I saved the cards BIOS, which opened fine in a bios editor. The version shown exactly matched the stickers one on the flash rom. So I don't think it had ever been overwritten. With very little hope left, I flashed an older bios version with nvflash. And what do you know, it started working perfectly. So the cards bios data must have been damaged in a way that did not trip the bios option rom checksum verification.

I remember this was one of the hottest running cards I've ever come across. 3dfx could have just slapped a cheap fan on it. I had jury rig one using a PCI bracket to cool mine.

Great video! I have a voodoo banshee pci the diamond monster fusion that doesn't work,when i put another vga pci or agp i can see it get recognised on the task manager but when i try to update the bios through diamond update utility i get a message that the card is not found.

I still have two voodoo 3 2000 in my stash of old tech :)

I was able to recover a rare / old Supertek V3000-16 (Voodoo 3 - 3000/16gb AGP) that would not output any video at boot originally using this process, thanks! I am planning to pair it with a matching black Creative Labs Blaster BX chipset slot-1 Board (m003) in a reverse sleeper build using a modern Fractal Focus-G case with 5.25" drive bays .. it would have been a huge bummer if the card didn't end up working so this bit of knowledge was clutch.

Very nice. I'm thinking of doing some video memory repair myself but I not sure where to reliably source for those memory modules.

I have a P3 733 that would love a voodoo card if you're ever feeling charitable!

all three back to life! well done. and you should always clean the connections of any used hardware before you put it in your stuff, you dont know where it has been.

I chucked mine in the bin years ago as I knew I would never use it again, so regret it now......

I see we have the same SMT electrolytic removal method!

Wow 3 Voodoo 3 cards for the price of one! I wish I had a PCI version of the 3000 to combine with an nVidia AGP card and have the best of two worlds in one single retro machine, instead of having several cards over several retro computers.

Voodoo 3 3000 is great retro card to play on :D i have the Compaq version i think more than 1 too actually i think all of them was from compaq systems :D

Always a rock solid glide3 card really good at most 3d actually. There was one that got passed around my extended family for YEARS. It had about 20 owners. No exaggerating. Everytime someone built a PC we always asked the same question.. "are you on the voodoo 3?" 'the' voodoo 3 😂 Great card. It actually lies about it's true mem though 16 cards are actually 14.5!?!

Always keep two, 2nd one as backup.

Like ! Wow this video was just like a drama movie with a happy end :)))

"i went and did what any reasonable person would do" lmao love the video btw!

You lucky so & so :-O Nice repair vid :-)

I used to have a voodoo 3 3000 PCI. No idea what happened to it unfortunately. I recently found the box with everything in it. Now to find a deal on a PCI card to match the box.

First 3dfx card I got was a voodoo. Just to play kingpin. Why on earth are they still selling for crazy prices? Regret losing mine now 😄

I almost forgot I had a system like this.

Wow! I thought I bricked my V3 by doing a BIOS flash. I need to bust it out and see if it still works with another card in a PCI slot. TY!!!!!!!!!

you're a voodoo god!

I have the first voodoo and the second voodoo. Gotta admit I didn't even know till recent times there were more.

Hello. I really enjoy your videos, very awesome work. I am wondering what brand desoldering gun you use? I am interested in your soldering setup. If you can point me in the right direction, I will be so grateful. Keep up the great work/videos. Thanks again.

Genius!

I still have my Voodoo 3 2000 PCI card I bought back in 99.

I have a defective V3 1000 that I might try to repair some day, as it’s the only 3dfx card I own and it’s a shame it doesn’t work properly It’s defective in that it does boot and install drivers, but it shows artifacting in win98se and 3d applications freeze the pc when they start, so I’m assuming vram failure

Hello. I got a voodoo 3 recently and the display on the screen was cut off like alternate vertical black stripes. I did notice that one resistor R65 is broken (above the main chip). Could this be a reason for the issue?

I have a Voodoo 2 12MB that puts this strange red static on some textures. Any idea what that could be?

You’re lucky, man!

I have seen these video cards used in many video arcade games. My Arctic Thunder has one. Golden tee also had a PCI version. I may have a dead PCI one here I could send you.

got the same coffee machine :)

that was a great video. instant subscribe from me!

I recently got a voodoo 3 3000 AGP off of ebay, i took a gamble since it was sold as is, I think it may be broken, it will boot up, however no matter what driver I install it has horrible artifacting and under settings it will only display 256 colors and 640x480 those are the only options under settings, does this sound like a destroyed card to you? When games actually would launch the textures were awful and I was getting single digit frame rates.

Great video, do you by chance want to sell one of your working cards for a decent price , I have a golden tee completed that needs a new card mins is starting to go 😢

Depend on luck.. Some times i find that, dead cards, that have no signal, will work just fine, after cleaning their slot with isopropyl alcohol 95% usually works great for me.. For example last time i did test number of my 3Dfx cards, one of my Banshee cards did have no signal... And after cleaning its AGP slot, did post fine..

Rumor is those cards where use to mine. 3dfx mining bios.

i want one 😁

I was with you all the way up until you decided to go with decaf. ;)

Im still whaiting for new voodoo 3 3000 drivers, any news?

Most likely bit rot in the vbios due to the graphic unable to post through the VGA port only seen a few behave like that in newer graphic cards usually reflashing the vbios fixes it and some cases it the GPU core that failed Got a question are you using a Weller Soldering Station as it looks similar to mine as it looks like using magistat tips

4:30 I have an old A7V non 133 motherboard, 100MHz front-side bus. Did you ever try to max out that motherboard or the A7V133? I think that motherboard would take up to a mobile Barton and I had my T-bred B running at just under 2.5GHz (104MHz by 24x multiplier) like 16 years ago, can't even remember how long ago it was. Might make for an interesting video or two!

nice! :))

i would still reflow all connections on that second card.