Physical impedances in a P1 build \ VOGONS

Physical impedances in a P1 build

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First post, by Bizz

Bizz Offline

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Rank: Newbie
Posts: 1
Joined: 2021-01-06, 10:41

I couldn’t believe my luck, I found a Voodoo2 in a trash pile at the local recycling depot. It’s an 8MB Diamond build and I’m on my native voyage build with it.
Build specs:
- Mother board - VX97 (with custom BIOS)
- AMD K62 500mhz
- 16mb RAM
- ISA Sound Blaster CT4180

Now, the hiccup:
- S3 ViRGE
- Voodoo2

They are physically impacted by the heatsink of the CPU.
There is some bend and sway in the cards both above and below the CPU; the Voodoo2 is above and S3 below. No electrical connection, but the voodoo2 has a couple of RAM chips against the CPU.

Is this a bad idea?

Reply 1 of 2, by dominusprog

Posted on Today, 07:55

dominusprog Offline

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Posts: 888
Joined: 2022-07-02, 00:52
Location: Innsmouth

Yes, it will damage both cards in the long run. Find a smaller 50x50mm heatsink, also swap the cards.

PS. Increase the RAM to at least 64MiB.

A-Trend ATC-1020 V1.1 ❇ Cyrix 6x86 150+ @ 120MHz ❇ 32MiB EDO RAM (8MiBx4) ❇ A-Trend S3 Trio64V2 2MiB
Creative AWE64 Value ❇ 8.4GiB Quantum Fireball ❇ Win95 OSR2 Plus!

Reply 2 of 2, by dionb

Posted on Today, 09:01

dionb Offline

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Location: Amsterdam

And/or look for a different motherboard. The BabyAT form factor always has challenges with some long cards, but a lot of boards have the CPU lower down, impacting a couple of ISA slots and leaving one or two PCI slots free for longer cards.

There are also shorter S3 Virge cards - in particular cards by Diamond and ELSA are frequently not much longer than the slot itself. I see the Diamond Stealth3D 3000 pop up quite a lot. It also has very good analog image quality (commonly poor on S3-based cards)

dominusprog wrote on Today, 07:55:

[...]

PS. Increase the RAM to at least 64MiB.

To max 64MiB. This board has an i430VX chipset and can only cache 64MB. If it's just about playing games, no game that would run well on this setup would need more than 64MB.

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