Maybe the previous owner clocked it down?

Looks like a standard 2000 with some ancient BIOS version.

Clock settings are stored in the BIOS, flash it with a normal 2000 version and it'll run at 143 😉

lazibayer wrote:

Maybe the previous owner clocked it down?

How could he've done this permanently while still having a 2000 BIOS?
Plus, sorry I forgot to tell you guys, there is a second identical card.

jwt27 wrote:

Looks like a standard 2000 with some ancient BIOS version.

Clock settings are stored in the BIOS, flash it with a normal 2000 version and it'll run at 143 😉

Are we sure that, apart from the known risks when flashing anything, this will work ok as with other standard 2000's? If this is just a matter of flashing a newer BIOS and still be a stock/normal 2000, I don't see why not do it. But I'm definately not trying to force the card at 143MHz if it's not stock settings or worse, risk to "brick" it because the memory can't handle the new speed. I want it to last for as long as possible.

Regardless of what I'll end up doing and whether the card can operate at 143MHz or not, the main question remains: was such a card ever produced? On the specialized sites/forums one can find information for the weirdest 3dfx cards, but no reference anywhere of early 2000's (if it's because of an ancient BIOS) at 125MHz.

konc wrote:

How could he've done this permanently while still having a 2000 BIOS? Plus, sorry I forgot to tell you guys, there is a second i […]
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lazibayer wrote:

Maybe the previous owner clocked it down?

How could he've done this permanently while still having a 2000 BIOS?
Plus, sorry I forgot to tell you guys, there is a second identical card.

jwt27 wrote:

Looks like a standard 2000 with some ancient BIOS version.

Clock settings are stored in the BIOS, flash it with a normal 2000 version and it'll run at 143 😉

Are we sure that, apart from the known risks when flashing anything, this will work ok as with other standard 2000's? If this is just a matter of flashing a newer BIOS and still be a stock/normal 2000, I don't see why not do it. But I'm definately not trying to force the card at 143MHz if it's not stock settings or worse, risk to "brick" it because the memory can't handle the new speed. I want it to last for as long as possible.

Regardless of what I'll end up doing and whether the card can operate at 143MHz or not, the main question remains: was such a card ever produced? On the specialized sites/forums one can find information for the weirdest 3dfx cards, but no reference anywhere of early 2000's (if it's because of an ancient BIOS) at 125MHz.

Well there's the Voodoo3 1000 which may be found with 125MHz clock (says wikipedia). But this is clearly a 2000. Try overclocking it in Windows, if it runs stable on 143 it'll work with the normal BIOS.

Bricking is unlikely. If it does happen, just install a second (non-3dfx) PCI card and reflash.

OEM's and non OEM's of the same card typically had different clock speeds for these cards. Flashing the card is not a problem. Just get the most recent bios for a voodoo3 2000 and flash it. You could also use the 3dfx tools over clocking tab to alter the clock speed, but flashing is easier.

konc wrote:

lazibayer wrote:

Maybe the previous owner clocked it down?

How could he've done this permanently while still having a 2000 BIOS?
Plus, sorry I forgot to tell you guys, there is a second identical card.

The chip/memory speed is controlled by one or two PLLctr strings in the BIOS. Dump the BIOS, modify the strings with 3dfx or tdfx BIOS editor or any hex editor if you know the offset, then flash it back.

You can always try to "overclock" the card in Windows to 143MHz and even faster (up to 160 should not be a problem for 2000) to make sure the 143MHz is safe. If its all good, then flash it.

The only 125mhz cards I have seen are all OEM cards that don't have a heatsink attached. They are built on the same board as the Banshee.

I followed your suggestions guys and overclocked the card in windows to 143MHz. Ran some benchmaks/games etc and everything seemed fine, plus the memory chips are rated -G7 so I flashed it with the latest 2000 AGP BIOS. All good, we now have a regular 2000 😀

Just a note in case anyone ever attempts something similar: Stupid overclock tab doesn't refresh/re-read the speed that it considers as factory value for the card, unless it gets reinstalled. And since it can't be uninstalled, one has to uninstall-reinstall the whole voodoo tools package.

So the verdict for this card is that it is some unknown OEM 2000, clocked inexplicably (since it has a heatsink and memory is rated for higher speeds) lower, right? Why would anyone ever do that and still name it a 2000... Oh well, case closed I guess, thank you all for sharing your knowledge and suggestions on this.

Just bumping this up, as I seem to have gotten my hands on one of these too, and it came with the same dinky cooler as Konc's card. I have one of those PCI slot fans blowing on it right now but I really doubt it needs extra cooling at this speed.

I've been using it to help test Red-Ray's GPU detection in SIV and it really threw me off...

Is this some OEM card? This seems like something Dell or Compaq would do, but there's no non-3DFX branding on it anywhere.

xjas wrote:

I've been using it to help test Red-Ray's GPU detection in SIV and it really threw me off...

I was just reading your post and made me fell I would compare your Voodoo3 2000 to my Voodoo3 2000 so I did and spotted why SIV was reading FFFFFFFF.

Notice that with my Voodoo3 then Command is 0x0003 but with yours it's 0x0002, so yours does not have I/O Access and this is the reason for all the FFFFFFFFs.

Please will you try booting the system with just the Voodoo 3 installed and so we can see if this changes.

It would be almost trivial to get SIV to enable I/O Access on your card, but before doing this I feel I would like to see what happens with just the Voodoo 3 installed.

^^ cool, interesting to know there's a concrete difference between the two beyond clock speed. Is that in the (flashable) BIOS or is it a hardware/deviceID thing?

I've got a couple results with Beta 11 to put up; I was trying to boot into Hiren's Mini-XP instead of Win98 but it just refuses to boot for some reason. I'm out of time so I'll post the Win98 reports in the other thread & can maybe spend some more on this tomorrow...

I purchased two of these OEM 125Mhz cards at the beginning of the pandemic. When I arrived at the seller's house, he was hesitant to sell them to me, but I was stern with him (I did afterall travel far to get to him).

Anyways, flashing to 2.15.11 was a no go, I got the same error as the OP in this thread:

"Eeprom could not be written, A valid image should still exist in ROM"

Now luckily, I did not reboot my system when I saw this message, because a valid image obviously does not exist in ROM, since the 3DFX flasher blindly erases the ROM before checking to see whether it likes the file you're trying to flash.

Now here is something important to note: Although the 3DFX flasher.exe saves a so-called backup to "save.rom", it won't even flash that back after the unsuccessful flash attempt and the resultant BIOS erasure. The good news is that all you have to do if you want to flash the backup it made for you is open save.rom in a hex editor, and pad it to 64KB (fill it with "FF").

Now, the solution is quite simple however if you do want to flash 2.15.11

You see, there are two versions of this BIOS floating around:

CRC-32 0535220E
CRC-32 AF144C8A

0535220E is the correct one, and works at least with this card version. So off I went to my hex editor and padded it to 64KB, booted off a floppy and flashed it without issue. I am attaching it here, as well as the original OEM (Compaq?) BIOS if anyone want so examine it.

EDIT: Comparing the two versions, it seems like the one it won't flash only has one difference: Someone removed "Provided By www.V3Info.co.uk" from it... So I guess AF144C8A just needs its checksum recalculated for it to work.