Looks like it is about to take it's last breath of air. Ebay you say? Hmmm.... Money back then!

brostenen wrote:

Looks like it is about to take it's last breath of air. Ebay you say? Hmmm.... Money back then!

That's what I thought, damn. I wanted a Voodoo 3 AGP. It was shown as "WORKING AND USED!"

These are still pretty cheap: http://www.ebay.com/itm/3dfx-voodoo-3-210-036 … dYAAOSwZjJU7Kkf

I just went through this myself last month... Took 5 cards to finally get a good one, but to the credit of the Ebayer he made sure that I got cards until we finally got a working unit. Not sure why he didn't test them first? Seems like he would have saved $$$ on shipping.

Oldbitcollector wrote:

I just went through this myself last month... Took 5 cards to finally get a good one, but to the credit of the Ebayer he made sure that I got cards until we finally got a working unit. Not sure why he didn't test them first? Seems like he would have saved $$$ on shipping.

Who was the seller, if you don't mind my asking?

H

saturn wrote:

Some things to try. Make sure the motherboard works with other cards around the same age. Reset cmos Try the card in another's s […]
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Some things to try.
Make sure the motherboard works with other cards around the same age.
Reset cmos
Try the card in another's system.
Clean the agp fingers (the part that goes in the socket.)
Make sure nothing is missing.
Make sure no pins are missing or poped out of the vga port and try the s-video port.
Use newer real drivers such as sfft or amigerlen.
Complain to the seller and get your money back.
If you don't get it back bake the card.

Card isn't detected by windows, other cards work fine. I tried cleaning the AGP fingers also, I don't have another system.

G

I did, forcing them caused Window's to boot to a blackscreen with just a mouse cursor. And PnP on and off didn't fix it.

That's too bad MrEWhite, looks like a terminal case. It's particularly troubling that the Voodoo 3 isn't detected by Windows.

Does the 3dfx ID string show up when the PC powers up/reboots? Is the BIOS boot screen readable?

The 3DFX Voodoo 3 stuff does show before the BIOS, and MS-DOS (the command part) and the BIOS shows correctly. Games like Quake or Blood or DOOM don't.

Try looking at the ICs closely and see if any of them have any bent legs shorting.... Pay extra attention to the memory ICs - every time I see a glitch with a repeating pattern memory is my fist suspect, though the non-detection might point at the main chip.

alexanrs wrote:

every time I see a glitch with a repeating pattern memory is my fist suspect.

Yes.

Also check for bad solder joints (cold joints) where the solder did not bond with the leads or the solder pad.
https://www.google.com/search?q=cold+joints+s … KHa8HDYgQsAQIIw
Sometimes a connection that is almost okay will finally break due to heat-up cool-down cycles.
.

Well, I got a refund without having to return, so that's nice.

It looks like bad RAM on the video card to me. I think you should pursue a refund or replacement.

Got one for a dollar less than the broken one, works fine.

MrEWhite wrote:

Got one for a dollar less than the broken one, works fine.

Yay! I went through this with a Geforce 8800GTX. Bought it for $39 and the first one was bad. Sent screenshot of corrupted display and he sent me another one without question. Let me keep the old one too. Someday I might try to reflow the solder in the oven to get it working again. Otherwise it's a display piece. 😀

The oven trick will most probably work very well on a 8800 series card. Most of the time it will come back after a few months (sometimes days) so crank up the fan speed to make it last a little longer.