Oh, what a sad story! R.I.P. dear voodoo 3.

Is the system capable of running AGP cards? It is a P4, right?

i was using it in primarily in systems. Both have PCI only, i recently picked up a cheap FX 5500. It as supposed to go into the pentium 3 system but wouldnt post. Put it in the socket 7 and it did. The socket 7 had the voodoo 3 and it did post in the pentium 3.
This wasnt so bad as the P3 would run better than the K6-2. And thats why i was trying various games to see it was worth it.
The third system does have agp and is running a ati 9600.
I had to put in a crappy SIS 305 into the P3 system to boot it as its the only PCI card i had left and i know works on that PC.

one easy test you can do is booting while gripping chips on the card one at a time. Start by grounding yourself to something to dissipate static electricity. Squeeze a chip with card pcb between your fingers and hold it tight while starting computer, repeat for all chips on the card. This is often enough to find a broken connection.

yeah tried pushing the chips and no changes.
I did some more voltage probing and not seeing anything out of place (but not knowing for sure on actual voltages).
Im measuring 2.5 V out of the bottom regulator. The caps either have 3.3V or 2.5 V.

Just 'coz it is a Voodoo, don't skip yer basic vintage voodoo (small v) troubleshooting routine... clean and clear, clean all the connectors, clear the ACPI tables and then the CMOS, stick it all back together and give it that "I triple dog dare you" stare while you power up.

But otherwise, yah, we've seen a few of those chips lifting pins or taking a mild knock and nuzzling their neighbour pins, or a scratch on them turning into a break that hangs on by a thread... until it doesn't.

There is a chance the video BIOS got corrupted. It happened to me once on a Banshee card. You can try the V3 as a secondary VGA and see if it gets detected on the PCI bus. If yes, then you can try to reflash it. That may work, but also possible the flash chip is damaged and can't be flashed again. In that case you can solder a plcc socket of appropriate size, find a flash memory of the same capacity as the original one, flash it in a TL866 (or something similar), insert into the socket.... and pray 😀

@havli im glad you mentioned this cause i was actually thinking of trying this. I did see the card detected in one of the wind0ws 98 machines as a vga device earlier.
I also found a 3dfx flash program on this page: http://3dfxbios.stantoworld.co.uk/
If you used something else can you give a link to it? The app above works from dos. It also had a dumping app i could use to check.
I just wasnt sure if it would let me flash in parallel with another card onboard.

I do have a TL866 so i could check it if i get it off. I think im going to need a hot air solder station. I think i have a plcc socket too.
I really hope its something like this.

It would be shame to just throw the V3 away without exhausting all the possibilities. 😀

I did this repair many years ago. At the time I didn't have any flash programmer, so I only used the 3dfx flash tool. My soldering skills are not that good, so I asked a friend to desolder the old chip and put the socket on instead.

After that I just used the 3dfx DOS flash application. Just a note - do not boot from floppy unless you absolutely have to. 😁 And one more thing - the 3dfx flash tool supports only a few flash chips. With something else, it won't work. At the time I did some research and found these as compatible:

Atmel: 29010, 49F010, 49BV512, 29LV512
SST: 29LE512, 29EE010, 39SF010, 39VF512
AMD: 29010

Anyway - if you have TL866, go ahead and use it - it will save you a lot of trouble. Also you might even get away with just any flash chip of the appropriate capacity and organization.

I was able to get the bios chip removed and read it back from the TL866 and its looks fine. I compared it to another and other than a string injected by the dumper of the internet bios its the same for the first 32K. The second 32K is all FF's except some bytes at the end. Maybe a serial number for eeprom, but im sure it doesnt matter.

I tried the 3dfx bios app (different versions as well) and the card is detected but the bios ID's come back as 0xAA. So i couldnt read or write the bios from the card.
Other than putting on a socket for the eeprom chip Im not sure what else i can do.