Hi, i have tested the v1 alot with p3 and p4s. But unluckely, i have never managed to get the v1 work with a cpu above 500 mhz. Some windows games may work with bit faster cpus but dos games always crashed above. So i would say its useless. Buut there is a SIS chip for the 478 socket that may work. But you have to have the right bios and than additionally with the right options. I tracked it down and found 5 boards which shall work but its hard to track them down.

gen_angry wrote on 2023-01-03, 12:20:

I had heard about the voodoo 1s burning themselves out and/or just not working correctly if placed in a system too fast for it but don't know if there's any truth to that. If so, are there any countermeasures I can add that would help or is it just not worth it?

Yes there is much truth to it, do a search in the forum and you'll find many references.
As to what you can do about it, if you mean "fixing" the issue I'm not so sure. For example on a PIII CPU you can lower the FSB to 66MHz for the voodoo to work. But bringing the machine down to what the card can handle isn't really a fix.

Why not? I have a p3 1000 and slow it down to 500 with the fsb. I have no issues running a v1 on that configuration. Installed just for security reasons a fan blowing to the card and no issues, also after 2 hours of playing.

I think it boils down to inherent instability of Voodooo 1 on default clock which cannot be triggered on slow system. If you lower Voodoo clocks speed, it may potentially fix this issue.

atom1kk wrote on 2023-01-05, 15:01:

Why not? I have a p3 1000 and slow it down to 500 with the fsb. I have no issues running a v1 on that configuration. Installed just for security reasons a fan blowing to the card and no issues, also after 2 hours of playing.

Well I don't disagree that this will allow you to use the card. Just that the way I see it you are not fixing the actual problem, which is that the card still won't work with a fast cpu/fsb. Anyway I don't mean to play with words, we agree that with this fix or "fix" you can use it.

But than what is the problem with this fix? The slowed down cpu behaves the same like an original one. So what should be wrong with that solution?

I fail to understand why a fast processor would cause a V1 to fail or cause Voodoo display glitches that are hardware related.

It's far more likely that the glide DLL has several code paths that are timing loop/wait dependent and the increased speed of newer/faster processors causes these to glitch out sending incomplete commands/data to the card.

You're still talking to the Voodoo over a 33MHz, 32bit, 5v PCI bus, so it cannot be the hardware interface itself.

From my poin of view it seems that it works fine in windows on 1Ghz P3, but dos drivers dont detect the card unless I change the fsb to 66Mhz to slow down the PC to 500Mhz. It would be nice if someone could modify the card detection issue with the dos glide.

Voodoo1 works with faster systems but keep in mind:

1. <366 Mhz everthing works (control-panel, glide, D3D)
2.>366 Mhz most things work (control-panel, glide, D3D has texture-issues (wrongly colored textures)
3. >xxx Mhz only glide works (no control-panel, no D3D)

It also depends on the driver you are using. fancy stuff from diamond tend to run only on the lowend.
the latest reference-drivers work better on faster systems. I can't make a statement to the third-party-driver-stuff.

Voodoo1 card tend to get very hot on faster systems, so active-cooling is recommended.
Doc

megatron-uk wrote on 2023-01-06, 08:51:

I fail to understand why a fast processor would cause a V1 to fail or cause Voodoo display glitches that are hardware related.

It's far more likely that the glide DLL has several code paths that are timing loop/wait dependent and the increased speed of newer/faster processors causes these to glitch out sending incomplete commands/data to the card.

You're still talking to the Voodoo over a 33MHz, 32bit, 5v PCI bus, so it cannot be the hardware interface itself.

Same here. Though I'm just a layman when it comes to the Voodoos.

Anyway, the 33 MHz/32-Bit bus is the limiting factor.
I/O can be as much as fast as the bus allows it, no further.
This includes latency, recovery time, edge/level signaling etc.

So either the Voodoos aren't capable at communicating at full speed (do use waistates etc) or the problem is another one.

At a guess there's some sort of wait/delay mechanism in the drivers which work well on the slower processors that were around at the time, but on later cpu's the number of cycles needed to be paused before issuing another command (for example) is simply not sufficient and the card doesn't respond correctly. Something along those lines is what I assume is the cause of the problem when using the Voodoo1/2 on later systems.

That's just a guess, but it would fit with the described behaviour, and why downclocking the processor whilst still having the card on the same 33MHz/32bit bus seems to solve the problem. There's probably some command buffer on the chip that gets full, a set delay time before the 3DFX registers can be read back after writing, or something similar that was mitigated in later hardware and/or drivers and why the original design either doesn't get detected properly, doesn't initialise or responds with weird textures etc. I'm no 3DFX chipset guru - back in the day I think I carried over my Voodoo 1 from a 6x86 P166+ through to a P3-450 without too many issues, but it got replaced by a TNT2 Ultra (and then a GF2 after that), so I didn't have the experience of using it on anything above those clock speeds.

Thanks for the responses everyone.

Miraculously I was able to revive the board. It wouldn't post at all the other day but after completely clearing the power a few times, it lives again. No idea, the caps look fine and I didn't change any settings. Must have been a funky residual charge that got stuck and wouldn't budge for a while. Maybe I'll need to look at the PSU - it is pretty old.

So reading all the issues posted and the sudden revival of my P200 build, I'll just keep the V1 in that build for now. All this info would def come in handy for anyone thinking of doing this though.