Have you tired it with only one card at a time to at least try and pin point which card is having the issue? I'd also recommend making sure the SLI cable is good and seating properly in each card.

Have you got any cooling on the cards? Maybe some air movement would help, although if it's happening that quickly after cold start then might not help for long.

Adding heatsinks and/or any other cooling system to the FBI and TMU chips on the Voodoo2 cards helps as they tend to heat up a bit after some time. Apart from that, does any other game besides Quake II aren't affected?

Shadzilla wrote on 2024-02-07, 15:26:

Have you got any cooling on the cards? Maybe some air movement would help, although if it's happening that quickly after cold start then might not help for long.

Well the card hasn't got any heatsinks but the case has an intake fan an exhaust fan but also a side panel fan blowing air directly on the cards , would have figured that would be enough.

chrismeyer6 wrote on 2024-02-07, 15:20:

Have you tired it with only one card at a time to at least try and pin point which card is having the issue? I'd also recommend making sure the SLI cable is good and seating properly in each card.

That's a good idea , ill have to do that for sure.

Gmlb256 wrote on 2024-02-07, 15:34:

Adding heatsinks and/or any other cooling system to the FBI and TMU chips on the Voodoo2 cards helps as they tend to heat up a bit after some time. Apart from that, does any other game besides Quake II aren't affected?

I'll try some other games to see if they have any issues crop up.

AppleSauce wrote on 2024-02-07, 15:57:

Shadzilla wrote on 2024-02-07, 15:26:

Have you got any cooling on the cards? Maybe some air movement would help, although if it's happening that quickly after cold start then might not help for long.

Well the card hasn't got any heatsinks but the case has an intake fan an exhaust fan but also a side panel fan blowing air directly on the cards , would have figured that would be enough.

20220828_204134 (1).jpg

Yes agreed, that side panel fan looks ideal, I don't think it should want anything more than that.

No amount of heatsinks is going to help with old 3dfx solder joints. Its time to refresh all the soldering on ram and chips.

So something interesting happened , I turned off palleted textures and the problem went away , is this a clue of what's going on to anyone?

It very well could be. Is this the only game having this issue?

AppleSauce wrote on 2024-02-08, 08:47:

So something interesting happened , I turned off palleted textures and the problem went away , is this a clue of what's going on to anyone?

Perhaps the 3dfx MiniGL driver shipped with the game is older than the one from Quake II.

I had something like those "band lines" occur while playing star wars rogue squadron with a V2 sli setup with a GF3 . Someone
recommended I connect the V2's directly to the monitor which cleared the artifacts up. It's no problem if you're main card
has a DVI hookup.

chrismeyer6 wrote on 2024-02-08, 11:39:

It very well could be. Is this the only game having this issue?

Yeah I tested Diablo 2 , Unreal , System Shock 2 and they all worked fine.

Then I went into the settings disabled sli ran heretic 2 and it crashed unless I picked the tutorial, I should have taken a picture of the error , it might have been a page fault issue?

The game ran fine in the tutorial , then I reactivated the sli ran the game , turned on the palletised textures and it had no issue , so yeah I'm a bit confused.

I'll do some more testing today.

To me this sounds more like a software issue than a hardware issue with your cards. Have you tried reinstalling your current drivers or even trying different drivers?

Random fits bad solder joint perfectly. Get a hair drier and heat both cards while playing the game, heat exasperates intermittent joint issues and will let you diagnose which card is the culprit.
Bad news - it will deteriorate with time and there is nothing, other than fixing it by refreshing solder on all the joints, you can do to slow it down.
Good news - you wont make it worse by just using it until further deterioration, if you are lucky it might be years until the card completely refuses to work.

rasz_pl wrote on 2024-02-09, 05:37:

Random fits bad solder joint perfectly. Get a hair drier and heat both cards while playing the game, heat exasperates intermittent joint issues and will let you diagnose which card is the culprit.
Bad news - it will deteriorate with time and there is nothing, other than fixing it by refreshing solder on all the joints, you can do to slow it down.
Good news - you wont make it worse by just using it until further deterioration, if you are lucky it might be years until the card completely refuses to work.

I made an inspection of the card I couldn't see anything physically wrong with the pcbs or chips and stuff but when I opened the case there was a spiders web one of the RAM chips , no idea if that might have done something bad or not , but I cleaned it off and the issues still there.
I'll look into reflowing it.

chrismeyer6 wrote on 2024-02-08, 23:26:

To me this sounds more like a software issue than a hardware issue with your cards. Have you tried reinstalling your current drivers or even trying different drivers?

I'm using the fastvoodoo drivers for mismatched cards , I could try another one I guess , no idea if it might break sli support though.

AppleSauce wrote on 2024-02-11, 10:16:

I'm using the fastvoodoo drivers for mismatched cards , I could try another one I guess , no idea if it might break sli support though.

The Fast Voodoo drivers bump up the clocks on the card slightly which isn't particularly obvious unless you happen to spot it in the display settings. Have you checked that, and dropped it back to stock speeds if necessary?

Shadzilla wrote on 2024-02-11, 12:16:

AppleSauce wrote on 2024-02-11, 10:16:

I'm using the fastvoodoo drivers for mismatched cards , I could try another one I guess , no idea if it might break sli support though.

The Fast Voodoo drivers bump up the clocks on the card slightly which isn't particularly obvious unless you happen to spot it in the display settings. Have you checked that, and dropped it back to stock speeds if necessary?

I had no idea that it mucked about with the clock settings , ill give that a look.