Hmmm... so, the RAM has been soldered and the cards work! But, it’s show 6MB of TMU RAM, not 8MB... very odd. Will keep updated! It could well be duff chips.

Countless reflows and checks but still not playing ball so I’ll leave it there. Guessing bad chips. I’ll remove them and maybe return to this one day.

Perhaps look for any differences in resistors / capacitors around the chips between the 8mb and 12mb versions. I've been considering trying the same thing myself so I hope you succeed 😁

There's a similar thread here on a german forum:
http://extreme.pcgameshardware.de/tagebuecher … b-auf-12mb.html

Now what I didn't say in my last post was that I bought those same RAM chips when you linked them, because I've also wanted to do this for a while.

I just tried soldering them on and it has taken *so long*. I should have cleaned the chips more, they are actually pretty difficult to solder to sell. Though I was just using a soldering iron, switching to leaded solder having quite poor results with the lead-free stuff.
The main problem I've found is that maybe the chip legs are at unequal heights? I should have checked them harder before going ahead. Anyways, once the isopropyl alcohol dries, I'll give a go with my card as well and report results.

Use S3 Virge or similar card to check if the RAM is dead.

Thermalwrong wrote:

Perhaps look for any differences in resistors / capacitors around the chips between the 8mb and 12mb versions. I've been considering trying the same thing myself so I hope you succeed 😁

There's a similar thread here on a german forum:
http://extreme.pcgameshardware.de/tagebuecher … b-auf-12mb.html

All of the resistors are located identically. Got some super weird results so I'm chalking this up to bad RAM. Once removed the cards work fine again.

Thermalwrong wrote:

Now what I didn't say in my last post was that I bought those same RAM chips when you linked them, because I've also wanted to do this for a while.

I just tried soldering them on and it has taken *so long*. I should have cleaned the chips more, they are actually pretty difficult to solder to sell. Though I was just using a soldering iron, switching to leaded solder having quite poor results with the lead-free stuff.
The main problem I've found is that maybe the chip legs are at unequal heights? I should have checked them harder before going ahead. Anyways, once the isopropyl alcohol dries, I'll give a go with my card as well and report results.

Yeah, this took my brother the best part of a day, so it's pretty disappointing that it didn't work! Once installed it bumped up to 6MB of RAM on one card and the other card the RAM detected went down and displayed as 3MB!

I think this is doable with a lot of patience, but be careful where you buy the RAM! I expect if I were to get donor RAM from a good card, this would've worked fine.

I finally had a chance to test this out - the drivers show 4MB Frame Buffer and 8MB Texture Memory 😀 So now it's a 12MB card, thanks for the pointer to these chips!

I'll get some pictures of the card once I've tested it with a game and hopefully there won't be any texture corruption etc

Use S3 Virge or similar card to check if the RAM is dead.

Sadly, not really possible, I didn't install SOJ sockets, just soldered the chips directly. Even a single address / data line that's not connected or bridged will cause real problems with the memory, which might be why Rich is now seeing less memory than before the upgrade.

Thermalwrong wrote:

I finally had a chance to test this out - the drivers show 4MB Frame Buffer and 8MB Texture Memory :) So now it's a 12MB card, t […]
Show full quote

I finally had a chance to test this out - the drivers show 4MB Frame Buffer and 8MB Texture Memory 😀 So now it's a 12MB card, thanks for the pointer to these chips!

I'll get some pictures of the card once I've tested it with a game and hopefully there won't be any texture corruption etc

Use S3 Virge or similar card to check if the RAM is dead.

Sadly, not really possible, I didn't install SOJ sockets, just soldered the chips directly. Even a single address / data line that's not connected or bridged will cause real problems with the memory, which might be why Rich is now seeing less memory than before the upgrade.

Where did you buy the memory chips?
And what card did you upgrade?

I'm looking into it as well. I thought of installing sockets too, but I don't think that there is enough room on my card (Diamond Monster 3D II).

I thought of installing sockets too, but I don't think that there is enough room on my card

Check them beforehand on S3 Virge.

Okay, back with good news, the card works nicely and games work as they did before the upgrade.

The card itself is a generic 8mb reference design, probably a Pine or something similar, I couldn't see any branding on it other than 3Dfx:

I forgot to take any pictures of it before the upgrade because there are some good ones online already, but the front didn't change.

It now detects as a 12MB card in the driver's control panel:

The chips used can be found on thebay by searching for the part code in RichB93's original post. I think they are pretty old stock and were just loose in an anti static bag so I Recommend cleaning them and making sure the legs are equal height before proceeding. By getting them at an even height, and cleaning the chips and board, using solder paste, I expect they should go on properly without much trouble. I made the mistake of hand soldering these using my TS100 iron and an angled tip. It worked but it took a while before I was confident were no gaps or bridged pins.

See there's a gap at the top / front of the picture? While I was tinning and cleaning the pads, one of them fell off. Thankfully, this appears to be the only one that I could find that doesn't route anywhere.

I did find a few spots where under a microscope / zoomed macro camera shot, it looked like there were gaps between the SOJ chips and the pads - maybe they're okay underneath but I didn't want to take chances, so I even broke out the leaded solder and went over them until there was a clear join between the board and the chip.

So far, I've tested it with Unreal, Carmageddon 2 and glQuake, each of which works nicely - though I do get some HUD flickering in glQuake, I'm not sure what's causing that. I went from Voodoo 1 to TNT2 Ultra back in the day, I'm not as familiar with the Voodoo2

Weebob wrote:

RichB93 wrote:

Thank you. I did see that thread but it didn’t really get anywhere. Considering I’ve found a place that will do all the chips for just over £10, I figure it’s worth a go.

Yup, it just stops.

If you go ahead please please please update this one with any progress, I am very much interested in getting this done myself. I have my old diamond monster 2 8meg, I couldn't afford the 12meg at the time but it was the one I wanted.

I have an 8MB Diamond Monster 3D II. Even though 12MB doubles the texture memory, it doesn't improve performance. You'd probably be better off getting another 8MB card for SLI.

Good thing my STB BlackMagic VooDoo2 card has 12MB RAM.

bjwil1991 wrote:

Good thing my STB BlackMagic VooDoo2 card has 12MB RAM.

On balance I'd rather get a Voodoo III. 16MB RAM, no 2D card needed, and around Voodoo II SLI performance.

This was just a fun project / completionist thing for me - I have a Voodoo 1 now (yay!), 2x Voodoo 3 cards (in different PCs) and I am aware that the Voodoo 3 is roughly equal to a V2 SLI setup. So this upgraded Voodoo 2 is as good as it gets for the Voodoo 2 era, until I find another Voodoo 2 at a price I'm okay with paying. This memory upgrade cost about £12 + equipment and I paid around £35 for the card, I'm pretty happy with the outcome.

I have yet to notice a difference from its pre upgrade state, but I have bought a few too many computers to play with and don't really put much time into benchmarking right now.

I swear this game plays better in Glide renderer rather than D3D:

AtTheGates wrote:

bjwil1991 wrote:

Good thing my STB BlackMagic VooDoo2 card has 12MB RAM.

On balance I'd rather get a Voodoo III. 16MB RAM, no 2D card needed, and around Voodoo II SLI performance.

I also have a VooDoo3 3000 PCI (added a fan onto the heatsink) in my Socket 7 machine.

Even though 12MB doubles the texture memory, it doesn't improve performance.

There's a huge improvement in late games like American McGee Alice. Some Unreal Tournament maps are too huge for 8mb cards too.

Thermalwrong wrote:

This was just a fun project / completionist thing for me - I have a Voodoo 1 now (yay!), 2x Voodoo 3 cards (in different PCs) an […]
Show full quote

This was just a fun project / completionist thing for me - I have a Voodoo 1 now (yay!), 2x Voodoo 3 cards (in different PCs) and I am aware that the Voodoo 3 is roughly equal to a V2 SLI setup. So this upgraded Voodoo 2 is as good as it gets for the Voodoo 2 era, until I find another Voodoo 2 at a price I'm okay with paying. This memory upgrade cost about £12 + equipment and I paid around £35 for the card, I'm pretty happy with the outcome.

I have yet to notice a difference from its pre upgrade state, but I have bought a few too many computers to play with and don't really put much time into benchmarking right now.

I swear this game plays better in Glide renderer rather than D3D:

IMG_9717 (Custom).jpeg

It's a cool idea, but I'd be to worried about knackering the card. Voodoo II aren't cheap!!

The Serpent Rider wrote:

Even though 12MB doubles the texture memory, it doesn't improve performance.

There's a huge improvement in late games like American McGee Alice. Some Unreal Tournament maps are too huge for 8mb cards too.

That's texture swapping. No exactly more performance.

AtTheGates wrote:

Thermalwrong wrote:

This was just a fun project / completionist thing for me - I have a Voodoo 1 now (yay!), 2x Voodoo 3 cards (in different PCs) an […]
Show full quote

This was just a fun project / completionist thing for me - I have a Voodoo 1 now (yay!), 2x Voodoo 3 cards (in different PCs) and I am aware that the Voodoo 3 is roughly equal to a V2 SLI setup. So this upgraded Voodoo 2 is as good as it gets for the Voodoo 2 era, until I find another Voodoo 2 at a price I'm okay with paying. This memory upgrade cost about £12 + equipment and I paid around £35 for the card, I'm pretty happy with the outcome.

I have yet to notice a difference from its pre upgrade state, but I have bought a few too many computers to play with and don't really put much time into benchmarking right now.

I swear this game plays better in Glide renderer rather than D3D:

IMG_9717 (Custom).jpeg

It's a cool idea, but I'd be to worried about knackering the card. Voodoo II aren't cheap!!

It's easy enough to take the chips back off with a heat gun, then it's right back to where it started 😜

That's one reason I like working with this older PC stuff, no/few BGA chips to worry about.

Very nice testing guys! So does this also mean that when a card has image corruption we can simply remove 4mb and see if it behaves after that with only 8mb?

And how about 4mb? does that work as well?

Just bought a 2nd Voodoo II for SLI. I'm tempted to try this, but the image corruption is worrying!!