Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman wrote:

How did they die? 😢 How long is the life expectancy of a V5, by the way? Do you overclock?

My first V5 died because of overlocking (> 200 MHz). Hey, I was young and needed the FPS! 😅

The second one overheated because of failing fans - those tiny little heatsinks don't provide significant cooling just by themselves.

So, when I got the third one, I wanted to keep on the safe side (and get rid of the fan noise), so I took some epoxy and made this:

Don't do this. Glueing rather heavy heatsinks directly onto a BGA-mounted chip without any further support will cause the connection between the chip and the board to fail eventually. Especially when the heatsinks are hanging upside down when the board is installed.

My current Voodoo card isn't modified yet, but those crappy little fans already sound as if they'll fail soon. I'll try big heatsinks again, but this time I'll include something that clamps them onto the board itself.

Gernerally the V5 cards are rather easily damaged. This is no surprise, as compared to a contemporary "normal" video card, the V5 has twice the amount of components and in-between connections to fail. Put them on a rather weedy, big PCB, and you're just asking for trouble.
If you ask me, we are lucky there still are enough working V5 cards to go around... 😉

Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman wrote:

Since V5 PCI is rarer than V5 AGP, isn't it possible to pull the VSA-100 chip off of a V5 AGP, then use it to replace the broken chip on the V5 PCI? I've never tried such thing before, but practically, how difficult it is to take off and solder back a GPU chip?

Since the chips are BGA, swapping the chips seems impossible. Well, on the net you can find some adventurous approaches involving toaster ovens, but that'll unlikely work on a big and complex card like the V5.

5u3 wrote:

My first V5 died because of overlocking (> 200 MHz). Hey, I was young and needed the FPS! 😅

That was cruel. 😵 😁

5u3 wrote:

The second one overheated because of failing fans - those tiny little heatsinks don't provide significant cooling just by themselves.

So, when I got the third one, I wanted to keep on the safe side (and get rid of the fan noise), so I took some epoxy and made this:

While we're at it.......

Okay, call me squeamish, but frankly, replacing Voodoo5's heatsink and fan is something that I haven't tried before. I think removing the (glued) heatsink is the hardest part, especially because I'm afraid of damaging the VSA-100 chip.

However, I heard many times that putting the Voodoo5 in a freezer for few hours will make the glue layer brittle, making it easier to remove the factory default, shitty heatsinks.

So did you put your Voodoo5 in the freezer first before removing the heatsinks? I'm concerned about condensation; did you wrap the V5 in an airtight bag before putting it in the freezer?

5u3 wrote:

Since the chips are BGA, swapping the chips seems impossible. Well, on the net you can find some adventurous approaches involving toaster ovens, but that'll unlikely work on a big and complex card like the V5.

Nah, not me. At least not until someone else tried it first. Probably one of those insane folks at 3dfxZone will eventually do such thing. 😁

Ghetto edit: OMFG, there are insane X-Box modders that already found the way to remove BGA chips. Also, some overclockers were discussing about it as well.

I think the safest way is having a BGA rework shop to do the job for you, although I think it will be costly.

Removing the heatsinks is really easy, it works just as you described above.

Remove the fans and put the card into a plastic bag. Keep it in the freezer for a couple of hours. Take it out and slide a flat-headed screwdriver between the PCB and the heatsink. If you fear damaging the PCB, you can protect it by wedging a plastic card between the screwdriver and the PCB. Try not to touch the BGA core with the screwdriver, it is possible to accidentially lift the core off the PCB in case you slide it in too far. Gently twist the screwdriver, the heatsink should pop right off, requiring very little force. If it doesn't work at once, try it on the opposite side.
Most times all the glue sticks to the heatsink when it comes off. In some cases there is some of it left on the core, it can be scraped off with a sharp knife at a flat angle. Be careful though, it's much easier to damage the card while cleaning the core. Pay attention to the small round capacitors on the card.

With sufficiently big heatsinks (like those in the picture above) a fan will not be necessary any more, provided you have good airflow in your case. But be prepared, those heatsinks will get rather hot while the card is in use (similar to a Voodoo 3).

A couple of those zalman northbridge chipset heatsinks are probably the solution - lightweight, silent and a decent amount of thermal conduction. They've got to be at least as good as those horrid stock hsf combos. A PCI slot cooler card in the next slot would be the next step I'd say if it was running too hot.

I think a specific solvent is better for removing thermal epoxy than mechanical scraping. See a modders site I guess - they do this all the time.

That glue should dissolve if you use something like Oops or Goof Off. These are powerful solvents made of toluene, xylene and some other evil crap. Kinda like carburetor cleaner. Just get a little pool around the glue and wait a bit, rub, add more, rub, etc. It will take a while though. Do it where you have some air because that stuff is not healthy to breathe. I've done this before with Radeons and GeForces which used the annoying thermal epoxy.

The only problem with adding new heatsinks is that you're going to need to either epoxy them on or use thermal tape. There aren't any mounting holes on Voodoo5. If you use something like Arctic Silver Thermal Adhesive or Arctic Silver Alumina Thermal Adhesive, the heatsinks will NEVER come off again. Their epoxies are incredibly strong. I've ripped chips (RAM and GPUs!) right off cards trying to separate that epoxy. Believe me here. You should never expect that epoxy to break its bond if you use it.

I've recently discovered some awesome thermal tape that I'd suggest you use instead of epoxy if you think you'll ever want to separate the heatsinks from the card. It's called Chomerics Thermattach. It has extremely impressive adherence. There are two types, T411 and T412. T411 has the best bond strength but worse thermal conductivity. I've used T412 and its strength is still absolutely way beyond any other thermal tape I've ever used. I believe for attaching a cooler to Voodoo5 chips, you want T411.
http://www.madshrimps.be/?action=getarticle&n … 803&articID=612
I bought it from Sidewinder Computers:
http://www.sidewindercomputers.com/therinmat.html

Thanks for the tips, fellas, 😀

I should add that I was writing about how to clean off the excess glue, not how to separate the chip from the heatsink. Soaking the whole card with evil solvents isn't going to help get those apart. 😀

Well, actually it might but I bet that stuff would do other bad things to the card 🤣.

The zalman northbridges come with a syringe of thermal epoxy each. It'd probably come off if you wanted it to (isn't industrial strength like the arctic silver stuff).

Sorry for the Necro, but I eventually found the discussion regarding to mobos reccomended for Voodoo5 --hope it helps.

2.5 years ago,

Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman wrote:

... this comes from someone who has four Voodoo5 5500 AGP and five Voodoo5 5500 PCI Mac. 😉

How many have you got now? 😉

Amigaz wrote:

GL1zdA wrote:

Yes, I am aware of this. I have an AGP version. The PCIs are too expensive (probably Amiga guys look for it, because its the fas […]
Show full quote

Silent Loon wrote:

Welcome GL1zdA,

remember that - if you don't have the PCI version - all Voodoo5s are for the agp 2x slot, they run with 3.3V, NOT with 1.5V (AGP 4x) or 0.8V (AGP 8x). Running a 3.3.V card in a 1.5V Slot will destroy the card and / or the board! Normally cards and slots are keyed so you can't mix them. Nevertheless I've heard that there were some early P4 boards with 4x AGP that were not keyed, and also cards that had jumpers on it to select the right AGP speed / voltage (TNT2s board i.e. Diamond Viper Ultra), which some people oversaw - bzzzzzz !

Yes, I am aware of this. I have an AGP version. The PCIs are too expensive (probably Amiga guys look for it, because its the fastest that goes with their PCI expansion boards).

Silent Loon wrote:

By the way: there are forums of voodoo specialists on the web, where this particular question ("which is the fastest board for my V5") is discussed, so a little google search may be useful.

I tried to find a benchmark showing the Voodoo performance with various CPUs for 0.5h and simply hadn't enough time to look for the other setups. (or maybe I just asked google the wrong questions 😀)

Yeah, Amigan's are driving up the Voodoo 3/4/5 PCI Ebay prices

I know since I'm one of them 😁

Yeah and you're also driving up the prices on all the 68040 chips I need for my Mac Quadras, damn your eyes! 😠

There aren't any mounting holes on Voodoo5.

A bit late, only by about two years, but just to set the record straight, they do have mounting holes. Two at the corners of each chip... I forget the exact hole spacing, but it's a standard one supported by most of the small VGA/chipset coolers.

After 2 years of thinking, I'm now building a Voodoo 5500 PC on the Abit KT7 RAID (KT133) with Athlon Thunderbird 1000B. This Athlon was released on June 5, 2000, the Voodoo 5500 in June 2000 and the KT133 somewhere at that time. This would be the fastest PC you could build for the 5500 launch and after all these years I decided to always build 'historically accurate' PCs. My original idea was to build it with a dual BX board, but I want to run 98SE, so the additional CPU would do nothing. And the 1 GHz Athlon is faster (most of the time) than the 1 GHz PIII, which is also extremely rare (the 100 FSB version).

For the Voodoo, I will use a nice ASUS XP55T2P4 - 430HX ATX mobo with Pentium 200 MMX CPU. This machine is GLQuake themed. GLQuake was released January 22, 1997. It will run 95 OSR/2.0 and I will use AWE64 Gold for sound.

The counterargument to that is that at that period at least the GPU was one of the driving development forces rather than one of those that was driven by developments elsewhere. I don't think it's necessarily a bad match, but the power of the GPU at release would've been further along the curve than the CPU, so you ideally you would probably want a CPU that was from maybe a year and a half down the line.

so you ideally you would probably want a CPU that was from maybe a year and a half down the line.

Well, actually, it's right around 1ghz that the V5 really hits its stride. Yeah, it'll scale with faster CPUs than that, up to ~2ghz reportedly, but that mostly applies for lowered settings, not so much in 32-bit color with FSAA.

I need to come to terms with cooling my V5 as well. This made for an interesting read, but I guess I have to grab a 12 inch fan and build some airflow guides from card board.