Isn't that the Clock Crystal Oscillator? Probably put a different one in to make it go zoom zoom.

Nemesis nailed it. Still not sure why it wasn't soldered directly on the video card, adding those "long" wires could have been a bad ideia for a stable clock i think.

nemesis, rick6,

Thanks for the answer! After a little bit of digging, it seems to be a way of overclocking the card. IIRC, overclocking a Voodoo 3 was generally accomplished via reg editing or drivers. Why choose this much more complicated, and irreversible, method instead? I just don't see the advantage to it.

Thanks again.

Wasn't soldered onto the board because the original crystal was surface mount and the one he used was leades. He probably could have soldered it closer to the board if he would have bended the leads to mimick SMD.

mockingbird wrote:

Wasn't soldered onto the board because the original crystal was surface mount and the one he used was leades. He probably could have soldered it closer to the board if he would have bended the leads to mimick SMD.

Indeed!

KT7AGuy wrote:

overclocking a Voodoo 3 was generally accomplished via reg editing or drivers. Why choose this much more complicated, and irreversible, method instead? I just don't see the advantage to it..

Hardmods usually get you better results, but they can be a better way to kill the card faster also! Depends if you know what you're doing and the kind of cooling you add afterwards.
By the way, it is not irreversible at all unless you damage the solderpads.

I don't think they tried to overclock the card by replacing the oscillator: these usually have frequency of 14.318mhz on any PC PCI/AGP card, so replacing it will likely cause bus incompatibility.

Maybe the oscillator just have been moved away to allow mounting larger heatsinks?

It is relatively easy to mod the Voodoo 3 BIOS, and thereby set the boot-up core speed. But the Voodoo 3 runs pretty hot already in the stock configurations, with passive cooling.