Yeah I just add a fan and use cable ties to hold it to the heat sink via the holes that are available.

I just use the stock cooling.

Voodoo 3 was designed as boiler, they are incredibly reliable with stock cooling.

I put a bigger Heatsink on my Voodoo3 2000 AGP, and also clocked it down by modifying the BIOS. Having the luxury of some tools in the workshop (Milling machine) I modified a spare heatsink to fit the Voodoo3.

Putas wrote:

Voodoo 3 was designed as boiler, they are incredibly reliable with stock cooling.

True but you can get impressive clocks with a fan 😉

A 50mm fan with some bolts work just fine. In fact I found some bolts almost long enough to hold 2 fans and the heatsink.

Replace the thermal pad for paste also!

I went overboard on one of my V3 3k. 2x 50mm fans, AS5 thermal paste. Ramsinks. replaced all the crappy 10uf 16v caps. It only runs at 190mhz core/mem but sure it could handle more!

RogueTrip2012 wrote:

A 50mm fan with some bolts work just fine. In fact I found some bolts almost long enough to hold 2 fans and the heatsink.

Replace the thermal pad for paste also!

I went overboard on one of my V3 3k. 2x 50mm fans, AS5 thermal paste. Ramsinks. replaced all the crappy 10uf 16v caps. It only runs at 190mhz core/mem but sure it could handle more!

Hey let's see some pics of that. 😉

Back in the day I took the fan off of a socket 7 CPU cooler and screwed it right on the OEM V3 sink. Worked great for me, the fan holes lined up with the heatsink fins.

Those V3's get surprisingly hot, but I haven't heard of any thermal issues. Course I haven't gone looking for any. 🤣

I used an old northbridge heatsink with push pins that mounted perfectly into the existing holes on the card, with some thermal paste and a 40mm fan on top of it. 190mhz no probs.

Seem to recall getting around 180 ish or something around that just by blowing a 50mm Coolermaster Rifle over it with stock HS/thermal pad on a V3K ;D

Remember my brother flashed his card (Compaq PCI V2K, the one with 5.5ns RAM) to a V3k and it was flawless without cooling (if not a little toasty! 😉)

I inherited of a bunch of voodoo3. I was testing them yesterday and did notice they can go quite hot. I think they have been designed that way but i would definitely support installing a fan on the sink, if only to extend life expectancy/reliability .

I've never heard of one dieing and they came out in 1999. I think they might be proven tech at this point. Besides I prefer to figure out ways to remove fans from everything.

I have seen plenty of newer Nvidia stuff die in its own heat, the old Voodoo 3 does better somehow.

Swaaye wrote:

Besides I prefer to figure out ways to remove fans from everything.

+1

gerwin wrote:

I have seen plenty of newer Nvidia stuff die in its own heat, the old Voodoo 3 does better somehow.

NV had a few years of problems with the solder they were using on GF7 - GF9. It would fracture after repeated heating/cooling cycles, causing intermittent contact and either partial or total failure. There was a class action suit regarding this. Search for "bumpgate".

Voodoo3 surely uses the old school lead solder instead of modern eco-green-no-brain-damage-solder. 😉

I wonder whats greener, using a bit of lead to make stuff actually Last. Or having to scrap stuff and buy new stuff all the time because it breaks after a year.

bushwack wrote:

Hey let's see some pics of that. 😉

Heres a few crappy cell phone pics.

Voodoo 3 can do 200 MHz easily, you can most likely save yourself those fans as memory is the limiting factor.

The Idea here i think is that the 3dfx cards are Preciousss!
I got tons of crappy cards ( Ati rage Pro etc ) that i am real happy to run fanless, and they dont do 3d anyway. I would prefer a boosted heatsink over a fan anyday for the +1 bonus, but fan is easy, Moded sink is luxury.

Now the voodoo3: Sure they are heavy duty and all... But any electronics has a lifetime that is a function of many parameters: one of them being temperature cycle magnitude. Mo matter how resilient they are, you make them last longer by cooling them in order to reduces the thermal cycling stress.

That might be irrelevant for some people, but in 15-20 years from now when collectors and retro enthusiasts are going to want to use and preserve hardware that has become rare and valuable, they are going to think: Damn those folks back then should have taken better care of their stuff, now i gotta pay 200$ for that voodoo3.

Call me over zealous if you want but its still the way i think. Now i got my own personal and pretty unscientific rule about cooling electronic i deem valuable: If you cant keep you finger on a part because its too hot, then its worth cooling 😜

I definitely cant keep my finger on a Stock Voodoo3 heatsink more than a few seconds.

Just look at the C64 community, how many are starting to use heatsinks on many of the chips such as SID or PLA. Sure they were "designed" to work without them but now, after a couple decades of use. Ohh, chips are starting to fail. Quick lets Put heatsink on them before its too late!!!

I agree with swaaye about the fewer fans, the better...but I also agree with MaxWar about having precious hardware and being not too rough with it.
I keep my V3-2k PCI cool, but the rest will have to make due with a case fan in the vicinity

I agree with all the above. And yes, I can see it going the way MaxWar is predicting, so...

Just tried to measure the heat, on the tiny black square oem heatsink some cards have - with a digital thermometer having a rough probe on the end of a cable.

The egde of the heatsink seems to top out* at 52 degrees celcius, but how much hotter the actual gpu core is I have no idea, unless I pry off the glued heatsink and sacrifice my card to the furnace... 🤣

The memory seems to stay pretty lukewarm though, or perhaps that's just because I'm not running any 3D programs... ?
(*: bare open-air mobo+cpu&mem, no hdd, just stays put at POST screen, 2D only)