It's 3dfx Voodoo 3 3000 16MB AGP. Prices can range from 1 to 20€.

It's worth an awesome whole lot of glide gaming time!

I'll just keep it short, this card is one of the best bang for the buck without costing an arm and a leg let alone a first born. Just add a fan and you are good to go plus most overclock well for a little extra bang.

Agreed with the above.

This card seems to have seen a lot of use though, so you might want to check it for scratches and damages and clean the dust a bit. And give it some extra cooling, theres a few pics around which show how to tie-rib a fan to the heatsink without it damaging anything.

@Tetrium: how can you tell it's seen a lot of use, apart from the dust behind the connectors near the bracket, and the AGP pins?

psychz wrote:

@Tetrium: how can you tell it's seen a lot of use, apart from the dust behind the connectors near the bracket?

Dust usually won't accumulate if it's stocked up somewhere, so I assume it spend a lot of time while installed in a rig (or it sat unprotected in the air for extended amount of time), but since the back side of the card faces up when installed and the front side looks cleaner, I'd assume it was installed in a rig. The card was cleaned of dust, or the layer of dust which is in between the solder dots of the VGA output would've been similar to the dust on the rest of the card, and I know from experience the spaces between those solder dots are a bit of a hassle to clean, so this area is often skipped.

The AGP connector seems to indicate the card was installed and removed quite a bit (not terminally though) and for some reason the card looks "used" to me, theres actually a few scratch-looking traces through some of the areas of dust on the backside of the card, so it might have seen a bit of rough treatment (not critically though, just traces through the dirt) or perhaps moved against some other PCB while in transit or something.

I didn't see any obvious damages on either side of the card, but part of it is blurry.

So if it's your card, clean it and check it for any damages. It's still a good card (if it works 😁)

Thanks! I wondered about tell-tale signs of electronics wear, so I had to ask 😀 Tips like these make flea-market shopping easier!

psychz wrote:

Thanks! I wondered about tell-tale signs of electronics wear, so I had to ask 😀 Tips like these make flea-market shopping easier!

It usually makes a difference when seeing something for sale that's common and cheap with plenty of choices.

But I think that when I see something of questionable quality (scratches or maybe even signs the part might have been mistreated) but is very uncommon and very cheap, I'll still often take the gamble (I wouldn't be the only one who has gotten lucky this way a few times 😁).

And knowing what you're looking at will help a lot as well in judging if something is worth its price or not.

But remember that if some electronic component has a broken part, this doesn't guarantee it will be defective and if it looks pristine, it won't guarantee it will work 🤣

Yup, for example I've come across some S3 cards with missing caps/components that fell off due to bad handling, but they're not rare or something here, so you can safely pass. On the other hand, a Diamond S220 PCI Verité was my first (and only) PCI Rendition card. It looked bad and did use some soldering of a broken trace, but it appears to work perfectly! At least that's something that wasn't widespread here in Greece, as far as I know, so chances to find a better one at that time were next to none. I've even come across several motherboards which look pristine but had failed regulators, non-functional IDE controllers and stuff you can't spot just by inspection (easily, if at all). It's good to keep some tips in mind, like looking for bad caps etc, but you never know, and if the price is right/you're willing to spend some time to check if it is repairable... wth 🤣

psychz wrote:

Yup, for example I've come across some S3 cards with missing caps/components that fell off due to bad handling, but they're not rare or something here, so you can safely pass. On the other hand, a Diamond S220 PCI Verité was my first (and only) PCI Rendition card. It looked bad and did use some soldering of a broken trace, but it appears to work perfectly! At least that's something that wasn't widespread here in Greece, as far as I know, so chances to find a better one at that time were next to none. I've even come across several motherboards which look pristine but had failed regulators, non-functional IDE controllers and stuff you can't spot just by inspection (easily, if at all). It's good to keep some tips in mind, like looking for bad caps etc, but you never know, and if the price is right/you're willing to spend some time to check if it is repairable... wth 🤣

In The Netherlands, it's exactly that Rendition that was most common, but I also worked with computers during the XP days (building and repairing using donated parts) and even though the Diamond Stealth S220's were in fact quite common (though not as common as S3, those were piles upon piles of em with Ati kinda being second), I suspect these were tossed into the bin much earlier than other cards due to the lack of drivers for XP so fewer were left before more people started collecting these and when they were tossed, I had very few competitors 😁

In fact, I managed to get 5 or 6 of those Diamond Renditions, while never finding any Renditions from any other brand.

Diamond used to be a big seller here in NL during those Pentium 1 and 2 days. Heck, even Diamond TNT2 (Viper Viper v770) was the most common TNT2 card here!