VOGONS


First post, by peg

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I recently picked up a Voodoo 3500 Compaq version which appears to have some capacitors rem0ved on the right side of the card, labeled C131 and C132 (anyone know the values?):

Does anyone know what these are for and if I need to replace them? The card seems to work (edit: only the 2d part works fine, 3d has graphical artifacts).

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Last edited by peg on 2021-01-29, 00:06. Edited 1 time in total.

Reply 2 of 6, by peg

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Well it turns out there are issues with this card, specifically there are graphical artifacts when running in 3D. I tried 3D Mark 99 and it has glitches (verical lines going through certain parts) and eventually crashes the system. Tried running the same test with my other voodoo 2000 agp and it passed it just fine, so it's definitely the card.

So I replaced the 2 missing capacitors and the issue is exactly the same, so I guess there is something else wrong with the card? Is there anyway to fix this? The card has zero issues when running windows, 2d games, etc, it only appears when using 3d.

Reply 3 of 6, by peg

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So is this card basically a lost cause? Without the 3d stuff working, a Voodoo 3 is pretty useless.

Here are what the errors look like, vertical lines going through certain areas. If I run 3D mark 99, the errors get increasing worse before the whole thing crashes. I know the PC is not the issue as I have 4 other voodoo 3 cards (not 3500 though) that complete the test with zero issues.

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Reply 4 of 6, by auron

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heating the memory chips a bit one by one with a hairdryer might show which one is faulty. you probably want to cover the capacitors if you do this.

if you can find their datasheet you could also measure some voltages in-circuit, although someone else probably knows more about this.

Reply 6 of 6, by Blaster

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To me it looks like RAM issue. http://www.playtool.com/pages/artifacts/artifacts.html you can follow this guide. I had similar issue with ATI x1950XT, I soldered new faster ram K4J52324QE-BJ1A and it fixed the issue. Pretty sweat card now, dubble the RAM capacity and higher clock speed. Made myself X1950XTX. 🤣