jwt27 wrote:

That's 10µF 16V. But I really doubt it's a capacitor problem. You're saying it starts working after a while, but caps usually get worse when they warm up.
If you have hot air gun, preheater and IR thermometer, I would try reflowing the GPU first.

Thanks for the info. 😀

Hmmm... Then there are some confusions on the net, regarding cap's. Anyway... Checked just one last time today.
Solder joints look crisp and fine. Shiny and new, they look.

Reflowing the GPU! 😳 Hmmm...
Must check this out on the net, on how to do this kind of fix.
There are probably a lot of people having had all sort's of issues with later geforce cards (6000 to 9000 series).
Some tips on do's and dont's regarding this procedure?

With the proper tools, you would preheat the board to about 170-180°C, drop some liquid solder flux around the GPU, then blow hot air on and around the chip until it's about 200°C. Then stop, switch the preheater off, let it cool down, and clean all flux from the board.

Without a heater and air gun, you could use a normal oven instead, at 200-220°C (just a guess). I've never tried this myself but it seems to work for many people. This will leave a funny smell in your kitchen though.

Take the cooler of the card, wipe termal paste off, peel off any paper sticker, preheat oven to 180 degrees celsius, put the card in, leave for 10 minutes , then leave it in the oven to cool down slowly, asemble the cooler back.
This is how I reflow a geforce 7600gs, only problem is after a while the card dies so I need to reflow it again.

Cool. So the flux actually helps the solder when it's heated above 180 celcius?
And when it hits 200 to 220, the solder gets sticky and the flux helps it not to make it shorten out?
Would it be adviced to shield the rest of the card with alu-foil?
Exposing only the gpu chip!

Nahkri wrote:

Take the cooler of the card, wipe termal paste off, peel off any paper sticker, preheat oven to 180 degrees celsius, put the card in, leave for 10 minutes , then leave it in the oven to cool down slowly, asemble the cooler back.
This is how I reflow a geforce 7600gs, only problem is after a while the card dies so I need to reflow it again.

Try using flux next time 😉

brostenen wrote:

Cool. So the flux actually helps the solder when it's heated above 180 celcius? And when it hits 200 to 220, the solder gets sti […]
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Cool. So the flux actually helps the solder when it's heated above 180 celcius?
And when it hits 200 to 220, the solder gets sticky and the flux helps it not to make it shorten out?
Would it be adviced to shield the rest of the card with alu-foil?
Exposing only the gpu chip!

Yeah, that's basically what flux does. It makes the solder flow easier to where you want it, and form shiny spheres instead of turning into a shapeless gray blob.
Aluminium foil isn't necessary, I think. The idea of using a pre-heater is to heat the entire card evenly; if you heat up only one spot, the card will warp and bend when it cools down.

Where do i need to place the flux?around the video chip,or on the underside of the videocard?Won't it make a lot of smoke when heated in the oven?

Around the chip will do, it'll flow under when heated up. And yeah, smoke plumes are to be expected.

Though I'm thinking, using flux in an oven may not be as effective. Normally, you would add flux when the solder is already (close to) melting. If you heat the flux and solder together, most of the flux may have evaporated already before the solder melts.

My Compaq Voodoo 3 3500 with original BIOS 2.15.02 works with no delays or errors on a Asus TUSL2-C

Pentium 3 866
128MB SDRAM
Asus TUSL2-C Rev 1.04 (BIOS 1009)

All right.... Progress on this V3-3500-Compaq edition. 😜

Have not solved it on any of the machines that I have mentioned at the start of this tread. Not giving any image..... Though!!!
I have played around with my Asus A7V266-E motherboard today, and I thought to myself, why not give that V3 a spin.
And so I did. And behold..... It gave picture at boot 😳 It ran through the ENTIRE Win98se installation 😳 😳
And then it was rock stable while I did all the driver installation, rock stable on the V3 driver installation. Hmmmm....
I installed 3D-Mark99 and gave it a go with the Benchmark. And yup. It did go right through this. 😳
I ran the demo as soon as the benchmark were through, and it managed to run this too. Why?

My question is now. This card fails on all ALI-V, 440BX and MVP3 boards that I have. Even on my i820 and i815 board's.
Why does it run perfectly in AGP-Pro slot and not in any AGPx2 and Universal AGP (X2/X4)?
I still suspekt the caps around the VGA-Out as being on the brinck of dying, and not the GPU/Ram and the components
around these parts of the Voodoo card. The GPU has allways been running hot, even though it never gave picture till now.

Well... Never is a bit harsh term to use... It has never given any picture in the long run (that being more than 5 minutes, top)
Yet on some boards, it just does not give any picture at all, and some boards, the computer needs to be turned on for a bit.
Then need to be rebooted in order to produce the image on the monitor.
And then it will work for like 5-10 minutes and then shut down again. All machines have been working allright, just without
any picture on the monitor. (that is)

I had the same issue: Voodoo3 2000 PCI Rev. D, no picture, but no error beeps at bootup and OS seemed to be loading. jwt27's suggestion worked! Luckily, I didn't try messing around with reflowing/soldering, I could have ruined the card. But the fact that there was no error beep and the OS loaded was a strong indicator that the hardware must be OK.

I downloaded 3dfx-flash-recovery.zip from the Falconfly mirror here: http://falconfly.vogonswiki.com/tools.html, along with the newest BIOS for my card (2.15.06) from here: https://3dfxbios.cl-rahden.de/index.php?title=Voodoo3. Created the bootdisk and plugged the card into a PCI slot with an AGP card being used for output. Booted the disk, pressed y, waited a few seconds and BAM - the Voodoo3 lives again!

i rescued few 3Dfx Cards for friends, please try reflash the video bios.
had a banshee and a v2000 pci with no picture.. after desoldering the bios, flash a new one and resolder it it works like new.

matze79 wrote on 2018-04-09, 13:06:

i rescued few 3Dfx Cards for friends, please try reflash the video bios.
had a banshee and a v2000 pci with no picture.. after desoldering the bios, flash a new one and resolder it it works like new.

Pardon the brief bump, but I was wondering why matze79 desoldered the EEPROM on the 3dfx card and, presumably, flashed the EEPROM in an external programmer, then re-soldered the EEPROM - that is, rather than using the 3dfx flash tools while the card is installed in the system?

I am asking this specific question because I too have a Voodoo3 card with no signal and when i try to flash the card in the system, I receive an error that no 3dfx or Voodoo3 card was found. I was thus wondering if matze79 had this same issue for which a manual desolder and reflash solved the issue? If the EEPROM image has suffered too much bit rot, say, its completely deleted, will flashing the card in the system not work?

Much appreciated!

I couldn't flash my card, so I removed the flash IC and replaced it with a newly programmed one.
The software always said 'no 3dfx card found'.
Afterwards, everything was working fine.
The 3Dfx Flash Software still didnt find the Card, but it worked again.

Did you check if the card is present with lspci?
Use a Linux live disc to boot up and watch with lspci to see if it's recognized. If not, that will also not help you."

Thanks. I will put the Voodoo3 into my Ubuntu 18.04 system and see if lspci can find the card. If it can, I will desolder the EEPROM chip as you have done. If lspci does not find the 3dfx card, I will do nothing.

EDIT: LSPCI does not find the card. The heatsink doesn't get hot like it should - it gets luke warm only - thus I suspect something is wrong with the chipset or a solder joint on the BGA. Both voltage regulators have been replaced already, as have the capacitors (two caps had values 1/10 of what they should be).