VOGONS


First post, by tdc

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I recently got bit by the nostalgia bug and have been pulling old PC equipment out of my parents' crawlspace. Among the goodies was a Voodoo3 3000 AGP. My system POSTs with it, but unfortunately, the display is completely garbled and corrupted, looking like a SNES game when the cartridge has been pulled out, with partially-legible text interleaved with random characters that flash different colors. I've attached a photo of what it looks like. I have a Riva TNT and Geforce2 MX400 that both work fine in this system. The Voodoo3 card is in good physical condition. Is this something fixable or is this card dead?

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Reply 1 of 5, by Srandista

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Card have probably broken memory chip.

Socket 775 - ASRock 4CoreDual-VSTA, Pentium E6500K, 4GB RAM, Radeon 9800XT, ESS Solo-1, Win 98/XP
Socket A - Chaintech CT-7AIA, AMD Athlon XP 2400+, 1GB RAM, Radeon 9600XT, ESS ES1869F, Win 98

Reply 2 of 5, by kolderman

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I think I recall reading about someone once who was able to interpret the banding to point to the exact memory chip that was fried. There are people who fix voodoos (mainly voodoo5s) and I am sure they would know what to do with this.

Reply 3 of 5, by SSTV2

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This card is definitely fixable and the process itself shouldn't be too hard, because GPU is OK at least. From the photo it looks like you've lost memory completely, perhaps it doesn't get any power?

Reply 4 of 5, by Doornkaat

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The issue might also be a cracked BGA solder joint underneath the graphics chip. Those cards tend to get very hot and the chip/substrate might expand so a non ideal solder joint cracks and causes issues adressing the RAM. I have two cards that have similar image problems and pressing the chip against the PCB will temporarily solve the problem. If the sympthoms change when pressing the chip on the PCB you will need to reflow the card and probably not change any ram chips.

Please note this is something different from chip/substrate bonds cracking like on the Geforce 8xxx series! This can not be permanently fixed by reflowing.

Reply 5 of 5, by tdc

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Thanks for the advice. I tried Doornkaat's suggestion of pressing the chip, but that didn't seem to make a difference. So I'm guessing the RAM is fried, and that's beyond my capabilities to fix myself. Where should I look to find someone to repair this?