Not a good sign 🙁

I have two faulty voodoos at the moment, one of them shows these signs but much more aggressively and only after a while.

I might try a small reflow of the hottest chip and see if it works.

When there is a regular pattern of artifacts the problem is almost always in the memory or a cracked joint on the gpu side so one of your TMUs likely has a cracked joint or one of the vram chips has an issue. Overall reflow will help determine if the issue is a cracked joint or a defect on a deeper level.

Try a heatgun (gently) for a small reflow. You can also try and underclock it by 10mhz and see how it does.

I think when the underclock works there is some defective ram on the card.

I see, it seems like we all agree the thing is dying...
I'll try to get my hands on a heat gun since I don't own one. I'd have thrown it in the oven to be honest since I don't have much to lose at this point, but this particular card has non-removable (unless some desoldering takes place) plastic parts like vga & sli connectors.

Thank you all for your answers to this thread

Why get a heat gun and not a soldering iron?
You can reflow the joints safer with a soldering iron, the heatgun is too brutal IMHO

Don't do the oven trick, the chips and the pcb are quite old and beaten by now and plastic parts will melt, it will get ugly afterwards. It would be much better for you to get a heatgun with a small nozzle and heat only the part\contacts of the chip you want to reflow. Also before heating any chip put some flux on the chip pins. Flux is quite cheap and easy to get on any electronic store.

Still if you insist on putting the card inside a oven put some aluminium foil around plastic parts and try not going abore 190ºC i guess. I fear the pcb will warp.

I wrote that I'm NOT baking it, exactly because of plastic parts 😀
Keropi, reflowing SMD components such as the TMU's with a soldering iron? That's waaaaay beyond my capabilities, I'll screw things up for sure! I can barely solder through-hole stuff decently, so even all those memory chips is too much for me.
Thanks again guys for your help and advice on this, I'll keep you posted on developments.

You sure the card has clean contacts? Sometimes a bad ground-earth can cause problems. Check for worn capacitors (bulging and/or leaking caps). Do you have a multimeter? If you know what you're doing, connect multimeter to a good ground-earth and make sure all positive points give good values.

A oven bake won't be as damaging as some think as I've done whole boards that used the same plastics without issue however the weight and type of bonding is to be avoided for a whole reflow. Using an iron is the Best method unlike a hot air gun as the iron will.

All in all just get another card or pay someone who is experienced when it comes to soldering. A pro would desolder one or several things by hand then clean the contacts then resolder using a more modern solder that is less prone to cracking. For a $20-50 card that option is just not worth it right now.

Modern solder that is less prone to cracking?

I don`t even know how many ``modern`` graphics cards i have seen that died because of the modern stuff. I think the modern solder is rubbish when it comes to electronics that are exposed to lots of heat compared to the old stuff.

Many geforce and radeon cards died and many many xbox 360 and ps3 systems. We never had problems of this magnitude with older graphics cards and xbox1, ps1 and ps2.

In the past i never was afraid to buy a modern, fast card that was used by someone else for a year or so, it was a great way to buy highend cheap. The last years i buy new simply because i want to make sure the card has good cooling from day one. They die way to easy now....

In a way it is a shame that people know the ``oven trick`` because there are a lot of defective cards sold now (a lot of the errors come back within weeks/months)

meljor wrote:

Modern solder that is less prone to cracking? […]
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Modern solder that is less prone to cracking?

I don`t even know how many ``modern`` graphics cards i have seen that died because of the modern stuff. I think the modern solder is rubbish when it comes to electronics that are exposed to lots of heat compared to the old stuff.

Many geforce and radeon cards died and many many xbox 360 and ps3 systems. We never had problems of this magnitude with older graphics cards and xbox1, ps1 and ps2.

In the past i never was afraid to buy a modern, fast card that was used by someone else for a year or so, it was a great way to buy highend cheap. The last years i buy new simply because i want to make sure the card has good cooling from day one. They die way to easy now....

In a way it is a shame that people know the ``oven trick`` because there are a lot of defective cards sold now (a lot of the errors come back within weeks/months)

Very true, the fact the modern solder lacks lead (for health and environmental reasons i guess) makes it much more prone to crack with all the hot\cold (turn on\off) cycles.
Also the oven trick is horrible has it heats unecessary parts like electrolytic capacitors beyond their rated temperature.

I should inform that i believe that i found what was creating so many artifacts after a while playing on my voodoo2 (much like the op, but about 50 times worse, trust me). It's a faulty framebuffer chip which is the big chip in the middle near the pci connector. Still burning in hope that there could be a microscopic broken solder joint i tried to do a really quick reflow, and the chip did not survive. Windows would not detect the card afterwards. I already removed the chip from the card and now I'm going to order a cheap but proper reflow\rework station with proper nozzles and a bit of solder paste, and try to transplant the same chip from another defective voodoo2 and see how it does.
I couldn't find new framebuffer chips apart from this which isn't worthy http://www.ebay.com/itm/Lot-of-45-3DFX-500-00 … =item19ec86d11d
All-in-all it's really not worthy so much work, but it hurts to see these cards go...

So I managed to borrow a heat gun. After some reading and watching videos to see techniques used etc, I wrapped the rest in foil and very very gently heated the first MTU. Since the card didn't have a huge problem I went really easy on it, to the point that it was possible for the reflow not to succeed because of not enough heating.
Tried the card, nothing changed. Did the same for the second MTU and tried it again.

Oh well, free drugs. I'm currently trying to sell them for a working voodoo 😎

Ecstasy DLC activated!

Oh wow man! Groovy to the Max!!!

At-least its unique! 😁

Try again! You have to heat it up onto the point where the solder gets a nice shine. The card is dead, nothing to lose...

latest pics look worse IMHO...