The artifacts are a good indicator of an overheat, but not the only possibility. Is the card overclocked, or has it ever been? I have a voodoo 3 PCI that was overclocked at one point, overheated, then clocked back down to stock and it will still exhibit some artifacts.

nekurahoka wrote:

The artifacts are a good indicator of an overheat, but not the only possibility. Is the card overclocked, or has it ever been? I have a voodoo 3 PCI that was overclocked at one point, overheated, then clocked back down to stock and it will still exhibit some artifacts.

As long as i was the owner i never overclocked, the strange part is that happens on 3DMark 2000, the 3DMark 99Max works ok, and every game that i played was pretty much stable(SimCity 3k, Half Life, NFS 3 using glide, unreal using glide).

The system is currently: ASUS CUV4X, Pentium 3 1.1GHz(100mhz fsb),512MB SDRAM PC-133 ,Built-in soundcrap audio pci 128, 3dfx Voodoo3 3000 AGP, graphics aperture size is set to 16MB and AGP mode is 2X.

Just for the record, i would like to share my experience ( i don't think a new thread is needed since it's just my 2 cents ). I had a similar problem...a Voodoo 3 3000 which started to crash on both 3Dmark 99 and 2000.

Given the fact i always suggest to put a fan blowing nearby / or installing one upon on these inadequate heatsinks, i pulled out a perfectly working V3 3000 from a machine, and installed to another machine to test it under games.

Both 3Dmark 99 and 3Dmark2000 started to crash randomly in some tests.

In the end I understood that it was the motherboard, which although apparently stable (I had stressed it well between CPU and RAM without giving errors), still caused the Voodoo 3 to crash in games. ( motherboards were both based on Apollo Pro 133 chipset )

_StIwY_ wrote on 2023-11-07, 14:00:

Just for the record, i would like to share my experience ( i don't think a new thread is needed since it's just my 2 cents ). I […]
Show full quote

Just for the record, i would like to share my experience ( i don't think a new thread is needed since it's just my 2 cents ). I had a similar problem...a Voodoo 3 3000 which started to crash on both 3Dmark 99 and 2000.

Given the fact i always suggest to put a fan blowing nearby / or installing one upon on these inadequate heatsinks, i pulled out a perfectly working V3 3000 from a machine, and installed to another machine to test it under games.

Both 3Dmark 99 and 3Dmark2000 started to crash randomly in some tests.

In the end I understood that it was the motherboard, which although apparently stable (I had stressed it well between CPU and RAM without giving errors), still caused the Voodoo 3 to crash in games. ( motherboards were both based on Apollo Pro 133 chipset )

VIA chipsets were kind of notorious for this. Sometimes, trying different versions of the 4-in-1 driver package could help. Some versions worked better than others with different hardware combinations.

Is it possible the old TIM on the heatsink isn't doing a good job anymore?

I would guess the motherboard, if possible test it in another board with the same CPU/RAM.

Not a general issue I would say, as I just yesterday ran 3DMark 2000 on my V3 3000 AGP perfectly fine.

Could be a hardware defect, incompatibility or software issue. I would first try to increase the Graphics Aperture Size in the BIOS, 16 MB does look a little low to me. I would try 64 MB (or the default the BIOS is using; but given your amount of RAM, 64 MB should be fine, even 128 MB). I remember, that setting was causing quite a lot of issues for me back then.

kingcake wrote on 2023-11-07, 15:00:

_StIwY_ wrote on 2023-11-07, 14:00:

Just for the record, i would like to share my experience ( i don't think a new thread is needed since it's just my 2 cents ). I […]
Show full quote

Just for the record, i would like to share my experience ( i don't think a new thread is needed since it's just my 2 cents ). I had a similar problem...a Voodoo 3 3000 which started to crash on both 3Dmark 99 and 2000.

Given the fact i always suggest to put a fan blowing nearby / or installing one upon on these inadequate heatsinks, i pulled out a perfectly working V3 3000 from a machine, and installed to another machine to test it under games.

Both 3Dmark 99 and 3Dmark2000 started to crash randomly in some tests.

In the end I understood that it was the motherboard, which although apparently stable (I had stressed it well between CPU and RAM without giving errors), still caused the Voodoo 3 to crash in games. ( motherboards were both based on Apollo Pro 133 chipset )

VIA chipsets were kind of notorious for this. Sometimes, trying different versions of the 4-in-1 driver package could help. Some versions worked better than others with different hardware combinations.

Uhm i don't know, i noticed more a stability problem other than a software one, because i noticed that the PC tended to crash less when it was still "cold". It was close to being able to complete 3DMark without crashing. While it started crashing immediately on the first test, after a few seconds, when the PC had already been on for 20 minutes