No motherboard model makes this hard to diagnose but if it's a VIA motherboard have you installed the VIA 4-in-1 drivers? Also, FastVoodoo drivers automatically overclocks cards, I wouldn't recommend their drivers while troubleshooting.

Tommybrownbear wrote:

so far games seem to run briefly before freezing and requiring a hard reset the others don't even get that far. The fact that it runs makes me think the card itself is ok.

The system is a Pentium 2 350mhz, 128mb ram, Aopen motherboard running win98se - it should be pretty correct for the period.

How long do games run for before they crash? At what point do they crash?

Can you please post high res photos of your card, back and front?
What exact motherboard do you have?
Can you post the rest of your system specs?

The motherboard is an AOpen AX6B
The primary video card is a matrox G450
I'm using a sound blaster live 5.1 CT4780

As for when things crash it seems different for each game, I played Tomb Raider last night with the patch and all seemed fine, no crashing for about half an hour or so. Maybe its the games themselves i'm having trouble with the X-wing collectors series which seems to crash about half way through the first mission. European Air War which crashes as soon as the cockpit loads up. Also Microsoft combat flight sim which crashes after the cockpit loads up but often i get 5 mins or so before it freezes.

I tried a few things last night swapped out the matrox card and removed the sound blaster live. Also wiped the system and started again with a fresh install. No luck so far.

This is really strange. I suppose the PSU is delivering stable voltages?
Do the crashes occur when using a different card for 3D? like the G450?
Can you try cooling the card with a fan and see if the games keep crashing?
And again, can you please post pictures of your card? Maybe the card is physically damaged.

So on closer examination there were several bent pins on one of the 3dfx chips, they must have been shorting out. I managed to bend them back into position gently or as near as i could manage. It now appears to be working fine although i need to put in some more time to be sure. The games that were crashing straight away now seem to be running fine.
Strange that some seemed to run better than others with the bent pins i'm surprised that it ran at all.

That's why pictures are ideal to rule out obvious problems.
Congratulations on getting the card working! 😀

Bent pins on Voodoo cards, especially Voodoo2, are very common. No idea why, but I never had any other cards with bent pins - but every second Voodoo card I got so far had at least one.

derSammler wrote:

Bent pins on Voodoo cards, especially Voodoo2, are very common. No idea why, but I never had any other cards with bent pins - but every second Voodoo card I got so far had at least one.

Thinking about it, yeah, I've even had a Voodoo 1 with legs that had been lifted off the PCB ever so slightly. Took a while to troubleshoot that one. 🤣
But I've never had anything like that on any other card. And lots of my collection are from e-waste piles. 😁