I doubt that you will get 200mhz stable and a vmod likely won't help but to shorten the life of the card however I remember reading that recapping the card will help. Those tiny 10UF electrolytics were not exactly the best for the job and that a small boost mhz wise can be had that way but remember that the limit on V3 era cards is more or less defined by the vram. 5ns will do wonders but 6ns caps you pretty far back from 200mhz, might do 183mhz stable (it should) but any thing over is just a bonus. Your cooling is my style 🤣 but remember the thermal resistance of the encapsulation of the gpu means that more heat would like to escape through the back.

Hm, thanks, I'll try to replace the capacitors, but ... I generally hate the surface mounted ones - I'll have to find the same diameter or it will look too ugly 😀

I would like to change the RAM too, but I don't have a dead card to canibalize from. (my Voodoo 3 3500 comes with 5.5ns Hynix, so if I find such a card dead, it will be perfect).

Blowing both sides of the card will keep the temperatures low, I hope.

Btw, I inspected the 3Dfx chip - it's surface is NOT flat at all - on the contrary, even with tightly fastened cooler, I see a large gap. It will take lots of arctic silver, cause I don't want to destroy the logo with sandpaper.

I don't think 6ns RAM is going to be good enough for 200mhz. I think you need 5ns for that. Don't forget that in older cards the memory and the video chip share a common clock signal so you can't overclock one without overclocking the other. The video chip might operate at 200mhz, but the memory won't and the card won't work.

You can find tdfx BIOS-Editor 1.62 here:
http://www.cl-rahden.de/3dfxbios/doku.php?id= … iki:tools:tools

I think 6ns RAM will work at 200MHz, if you increase the latencies accordingly. Check the RAM's datasheet for supported timings.

jwt27 wrote:

You can find tdfx BIOS-Editor 1.62 here:
http://www.cl-rahden.de/3dfxbios/doku.php?id= … iki:tools:tools

I think 6ns RAM will work at 200MHz, if you increase the latencies accordingly. Check the RAM's datasheet for supported timings.

Thanks, this site is priceless. I checked that BIOS editor readme (the russian documentation was easier to read, complared to the google translated 😀), and ... changing the core/memory frequency is a totall mystery (there's a formula, though).

Space Cowboy wrote:

jwt27 wrote:

You can find tdfx BIOS-Editor 1.62 here:
http://www.cl-rahden.de/3dfxbios/doku.php?id= … iki:tools:tools

I think 6ns RAM will work at 200MHz, if you increase the latencies accordingly. Check the RAM's datasheet for supported timings.

Thanks, this site is priceless. I checked that BIOS editor readme (the russian documentation was easier to read, complared to the google translated 😀), and ... changing the core/memory frequency is a totall mystery (there's a formula, though).

Core/mem frequencies are governed by a standard digital PLL, not very mysterious 😉

The technical reference manual has more information on that, and all the other BIOS settings: http://www.falconfly.de/reference.htm

You don't want to make the timings worse than they are but go ahead just be sure to have a recovery method if the flash goes bad. As for the caps they don't have to be the same diameter, google and see what work others have done and then you will get the idea. Usually when people edit the roms and edit the timings on the vram it is usually only to bother with the clocks but some have figured how to improve the timings. The performance gained from the improved timings is usually pretty nice but limits overclocking.

jwt27 wrote:

The technical reference manual has more information on that, and all the other BIOS settings: http://www.falconfly.de/reference.htm

Thanks, I've downloaded all the contents of this site some months ago.

I hope I'll find modded BIOS, so I can flash with it (I'm lazy) 😀

Something else comes to mind - I'm about to use this card on my k6-3+ @550 machine.

The Voodoo's were not really CPU dependant as I remember ...

I can't really say where the CPU becomes a bottleneck. Do I really need to overclock the Voodoo?

With that CPU I don't think overclocking the Voodoo 3 makes sense. Of course that always depends on the resolution so you should benchmark the games you want to play at different resolutions and see how performance scales. Keep in mind that at 1600x1200 texture memory will become scarce, ie. depending on the game that will become the bottleneck and overclocking won't help a lot.