that is odd.

Could it be that there is a cracked solder joint somewhere that only makes connection when the crack is filled with some conductive liquid (water)?

Try reflowing it or something. Water may be getting into a cold solder joint and temporarily bridging a connection. This assumes the water has sufficient ions in it to be conductive, but it may be leaching ions from the board and rapidly becoming conductive (deionized water doesn't stay deionized very long).

Well I just pulled it out of the oven and it's working dry now. Let's see how long this lasts..

Errius wrote:

Well I just pulled it out of the oven and it's working dry now. Let's see how long this lasts..

An old realtor trick to sell homes to gamers is to have the smell of freshly-baked 3D cards wafting through the house.

Errius wrote:

Well I just pulled it out of the oven and it's working dry now. Let's see how long this lasts..

It's been just under a week-- how is it doing?

Results are mixed. It now runs dry but it craps out after about 5-10 minutes. Touching the big 3DFX chips with my finger I see that they are running VERY hot. Is this normal?

I've mounted a big fan over the card and it now appears to be stable. I'm going to let the GLQuake demos run in a loop for an hour or so to be sure.

I think I saw someone mention overclocking of Voodoo cards somewhere. Is it possible to underclock them?

VooDoo 2 Tweaker

I used this on my Athlon 64 machine (800MHz FSB, 400MHz FSB actual) to downclock the VooDoo2 card to 75MHz on both Glide and Direct3D.

Errius wrote:

Results are mixed. It now runs dry but it craps out after about 5-10 minutes. Touching the big 3DFX chips with my finger I see that they are running VERY hot. Is this normal?

Bad caps?

Check the traces as well. I'd also put heatsinks on the main CPUs of the VooDoo2 card, as well as the RAM.

It's been running the Quake demos for several hours without problem. The fan clearly makes a difference. Adding heat sinks to the chips sounds like a good idea.

I also had a look at the tweak utility, but refresh rates are already at their lowest settings and the pixel clock is at 93%. Is this normal or have these settings already been modified?

Errius wrote:

It's been running the Quake demos for several hours without problem. The fan clearly makes a difference. Adding heat sinks to the chips sounds like a good idea.

I also had a look at the tweak utility, but refresh rates are already at their lowest settings and the pixel clock is at 93%. Is this normal or have these settings already been modified?

Those are normal. I'd suggest underclocking to 75MHz for both Glide and Direct3D to put less strain and heat to the chips. Mine was at 93MHz and I downclocked them since it's in a very fast computer.

These are the current settings. I have not changed anything.

The default speed of these cards is 90Mhz. They are actually overclocked now.

Card is running well at 75 MHz with the fan off. The chips are still hot but noticeably cooler than before.

There's no noticable slowdown. It's running on a 1 GHz Pentium III computer. Is there a Fraps-type frame rate utility for Voodoo cards?

ETA: Note that the underclock is done in software not hardware. This is a dual boot Windows 98 SE/Windows ME machine. I set the underclock in W98 and it still shows as 75 MHz after reboot. However when I boot into WME it shows as 93 MHz again.