My little Voodoo3 cooling project appears to have ended in tragedy... 😢
The card is a Voodoo3 3000 AGP which I attempted to upgrade with a fan and ramsinks. It worked fine prior to the modifications.
I had to freeze the card to get the heatsink off, and even then it required quite a bit of force to remove. I'm afraid I broke some solder joints in the process. As always, electrostatic discharge is also a remote possibility.
If I did break some solder joints, might I correct the damage by popping the card in the oven for a reflow or "bake?" The card's buggered as is, so I figure it's worth a shot...
Last edited by maximus on 2016-11-25, 21:41. Edited 1 time in total.
I'd agree - can't hurt to try baking it (if it's already slated for recycle as it is). At least it's a Voodoo3 and not something outlandishly rare and expensive. 😊
Only other thing that comes to mind is a bad connection between either the card and the system, or the card and the display. Would be easy to check but I'm doubting that's going to solve your problems.
Any cracking noises and did the cooler come off easy with a pop or did you have to bend it slightly a few times? You can bend the thin coolers safely a little at a time to break the epoxy and when cold it goes pretty easy. Some V3s have some sort of thermal adhesive pad that can be brutal when it comes to removal. There are a handful of 3DFX cards that you don't want to bother with trying to remove the cooler and those were the Banshee cards for Gateway and maybe ELSA. It is a silver or gray color in appearance but extremely strong even when attacked with alcohol and won't pop even after being in the freezer. If it is white or yellow the epoxy is very easy and the most common.
Destroyed one trying to mod it and ended up wasting another $25 replacing it. Sadly lost in arson attack.
On a far away planet reading your posts in the year 10,191.
Any cracking noises and did the cooler come off easy with a pop or did you have to bend it slightly a few times? You can bend the thin coolers safely a little at a time to break the epoxy and when cold it goes pretty easy. Some V3s have some sort of thermal adhesive pad that can be brutal when it comes to removal. There are a handful of 3DFX cards that you don't want to bother with trying to remove the cooler and those were the Banshee cards for Gateway and maybe ELSA. It is a silver or gray color in appearance but extremely strong even when attacked with alcohol and won't pop even after being in the freezer. If it is white or yellow the epoxy is very easy and the most common.
It was a white thermal pad. Got it off by prying with a screwdriver (placed a credit card on top of the PCB first to avoid scratching it). There was some bending involved, and it certainly did not pop. A very different experience from the last time I froze a card. That time the heatsink popped off very easily.
There were no alarming sounds that I could discern.
You killed one of the pall joints on the PCB itself lifting a pad from the pcb.
Leave those old HS alone, drop a fan on it an youre good. why make so much a hassle if you cannot seem to remove it easily.
You knew it was gonna break when you tried removing it....
Check the edges if the card has warped or not.
BTW to reflow any broken joints that could be repaired you need at least 5minutes of 662 degrees fahrenheit or 350oc Celcius to resolder any lead solder joints.
Try with a paint stripper from a distance and easily heat it, dont move the PCB leave it alone and see up close if any of the outer balls are beginning to shine like mirror, thats when the solder is liquid again.
Then a 30 sec longer hot air moving to make sure the middle grounded balls are also molten to create a small drop, this can cause the broken joints to reunite again.
After this is unsuccesfull you can declare it dead.
The default cooler is not well designed, the heat will stay in the gpu zone of the pcb (you would better not put your finger in this area too long while running some bench... 😁 ).
Even with a fan added that pcb area runs pretty hot (considering the size of the heatsink), like the heat would prefer go through the pcb than be dissipated by the heatsink 😖 .
For me it's a concern, heat always reduce life expectancy of components and the fact that it's localized on the pcb and more precisely where the solders are is a problem. 😜
After changing it by a motherboard heatsink with a 4 cm fan attached supplied with 5V, the pcb area stay cool even when 3dmark 2000 is running (my heart and my finger thanked me 🤣 )
^
This cools it down really well 🤣 Even the backside of the gpu die is not hot to the touch.
It also consumes an extra PCI slot but eh.
I don't think the reference sink is that bad as long as it has a high amount of airflow hitting it,
Theoretically there is nothing wrong with a voodoo 3 heatsink. Perhaps the contact between the heatsink and the GPU is not good enough? That's the only logical explanation.
Come to think of it, the termal paste or pad must have been the problem, but after taking the heatsink apart and cleaning all that mess, my first though was to change everything (just in case) 😁
I use some cooler like these now : http://www.ebay.com/itm/PC-VGA-Video-Graphics … =item20db33881a it really cools old graphic card down but it's just way too noiiiiiisy. Supplying it with +5V is not an option, it's a necessity 😵 (and even like that fan is pretty fast 🤣)
The original card is still dead. However, I decided to tempt fate by buying a new one and going ahead with my original mod plan.
This time, I ran the Unreal timedemo for about an hour before attempting to remove the heatsink. Success! The thermal pad let go much more easily, and evidently, no damage was done.
Here is the end result:
Thanks to RogueTrip2012 for the idea. Despite all the cooling, though, my card is STILL not stable at 183 MHZ! I guess it didn't have much headroom to begin with.
Last edited by maximus on 2016-11-25, 21:57. Edited 2 times in total.
I think the critical thing to avoid is try not to pry upward on something like this. This concentrates the stress on just a few joints. If the heatsink is twisted, then the stress is shared better between the solder joints.
This is probably easier said than done though. Prying is a hard temptation to avoid, and I'm sure I've done it as well.
I originally only shared this with Mau1wurf1977 privately because I'm a bit ashamed of the sloppy job I did.
After seeing your update and the extremely professional job you did with your cooling, I figured I would share with everybody else anwyay. This card is used in my IBM NetVista A40 1ghz system:
These are my own photos, that I took myself, of my own computer. I consider them to be Public Domain.
File license
Public domain
This card was a disaster when I received it. The heatsink fins were badly bent and disfigured by the previous owner. I replaced it with the Evercool VC-RE you see in the pics. I also glued the heatsinks to the RAM with Arctic Alumina thermal epoxy.
Because I never anticipated overclocking or anything else, I didn't think to line up the HSF with the holes in the board. Because of that, I had to attach the rear fan with about four layers of double-sided tape. It is very ugly, but it works. It's also very solidly attached, despite appearances.
If you're curious what a "Glacier 4500" fan was, it was part of a Slot 1 cooler circa 1999 that was sold by a now-defunct company called "Net N Dude". While the HSF is now long gone, that solitary fan lives on to cool the rear end of this ugly Voodoo 3.
maximus wrote:
Despite all the cooling, though, my card is STILL not stable at 183 MHZ! I guess it didn't have much headroom to begin with.
Even with all I've done to this card, I too can only get 181mhz out of it before it chokes on me.
From what I've read, to get a really good overclock on a Voodoo 3 you need to get either the 2000 or 3500 model.
Last edited by KT7AGuy on 2023-12-08, 16:15. Edited 1 time in total.
I originally only shared this with Mau1wurf1977 privately because I'm a bit ashamed of the sloppy job I did.
Hey, whatever works! I originally had the fan held down to the heatsink with zip ties 🤣
KT7AGuy wrote:
From what I've read, to get a really good overclock on a Voodoo 3 you need to get either the 2000 or 3500 model.
This is what I've read as well. The 3500 makes sense, but the 2000 is a bit of a mystery. Why would the lower clocked model be a better overclocker? (I'm still kicking myself for a missing a great deal on a 3500 a while back. Straight up forgot to bid... d'oh!)
Anyway, that's good to know that 183 MHz is a bit of a stretch. Clearly heat is not an issue with either of our setups, so it must be a limitation of the card. Just for the record, on my card, it looks like the core is the limiting factor. Everything is fine for a few minutes of Unreal, then the machine freezes and I have to do a hard reset. No memory artifacts up to this point. Too bad we can't adjust the core and memory clocks separately.
