ChrisK wrote on 2023-08-10, 08:24:I'm pretty sure there's some simple reason other than different logos on the 3dfx chips why SLI doesn't want to work with your c […]
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ubiq wrote on 2023-08-10, 01:03:
I recently managed to (separately) acquire two matching make and model Voodoo 2s and have been having pretty much no luck getting them working in SLI. They work independently just fine, but it won't detect SLI with both of them. I took them out and put them side by side and saw what I should have noticed from the start:IMG_5787.jpegIMG_5790.jpeg
So hmm yeah, one has the old 3Dfx logo and the other has the new 3dfx logo. Oh look at that, the old one has a VER:2.0 label and the new one has a VER:2.1 label. Cool - so this apparently makes them mismatched enough to not work with the reference drivers. Unfortunately, I can't even get them to work with any of the hacked drivers (FastVoodoo2, etc) either. I think might be because this looks like a revision to the entire reference design, including all the ICs, not just some manufacturer differences to the same reference design that some driver hacks can sort out. Maybe?
Anyway, I'm starting to think these absolutely won't work in SLI, dammit! 😫
I'm pretty sure there's some simple reason other than different logos on the 3dfx chips why SLI doesn't want to work with your cards out of the box.
I have the very same card as the left one on your photos combined with a Creative one and they work fine in SLI despite the Creative one being the more "classical" 12MB design with RAMs on front and back and the other one only having the RAMs on the front.
Did you check your SLI cable? Did you follow the installation instructions of the FastVoodoo driver? Did you swapp slots? How do you determine if SLI is working or not?
As a sidenote: I have never seen a Voodoo 2 card having a heatsink copper area under the TMU on the backside. So they must have known (of course they knew...) these chips are running hot and actively worked against this by design.
I'm not sure if this alone will be enough but it's better than nothing.
I dunno man. The cards appear to have been manufactured almost 2 years apart and I'm guessing are based off the reference design from 3Dfx. I think it's not unlikely that an update to the reference design could break SLI compatibility. Granted, other than the heatsinking, the only differences I can see visually are 3 * through-hole caps swapped for SMDs and different ram.
So. Yes, I swapped slots, motherboards, processors, RAM, PSU, and took out any superfluous cards. Clean Win98SE install. Tried with both DX7 and DX9 installed (I believe FastVoodoo reqs DX9). Even tried in Win2k and XP, for what that's worth. 😂
I did get frustrated enough to take my multimeter to the SLI cable and it checked out. It's the only one I have unfortunately, but it was new out of the package so I wouldn't expect it to be bad.
Cards always work separately, but together I get SLI "Not Detected" in the Sys Info box from the 3Dfx control panel. And I get a grey screen when I try to launch a Glide app. From what I can gather from my own googling, the FastVoodoo drivers are the best bet to get any weird configuration working. So, since those aren't working for me I'm throwing in the towel on these two. 🫠