Bit of a strange one this...

I have a system with a matched pair of 12MB STB Voodoo 2 cards installed in SLI (the rest of the system is Slot 1 PIII 700 on an Abit BH6, 128mb ram, Win98SE, Matrox G200 AGP). It's been built and running for a couple of years at this point and although doesn't get used that often always fires up and runs well, and has an 80mm fan blowing air across both cards. I recently received a new VGA pass through cable (for a planned Voodoo 1 build) and thought I'd better test it before it's too late to return. So I installed the cable, fired the system up, and went to test some games.

2D/Windows is all good. Direct3D games tested fine. Glide games... suddenly the colour is washed out and there are scan lines in the image, and it looks really low bit-rate (for lack of a better term). I checked the display properties and the 3Dfx tab and now it's saying SLI is not detected and isn't showing any specifics for the card(s) installed (latest official 3Dfx drivers). Swapping back to the original pass through cable makes no difference. I've been using a PCB SLI bridge but switching back to an original ribbon cable bridge makes no difference. I tested each card individually and the behaviour was exactly the same in terms of D3D and Glide, but at least with a single card the display properties panel works and shows the correct card information.

I've also been testing with Mojo both under Windows and in pure DOS. The output for both cards - when tested individually or installed together - is spot on. Apart from when I connect the SLI bridge, it still reads "SLI not detected". I've also tried the 'testsli.exe' utility which gives a similar output (and suggests swapping the cards around, which makes no difference). I've tried the 'resetsli.exe' utility as well which makes no difference before or after rebooting.

I'm not sure how relevant the Glide colour/etc issue is at this point given each card works ok in D3D, so I'm willing to stick in a pin in that for now and put it down to bad Glide version (although I'm 99% sure this system worked perfectly fine before this latest attempt). I think the bigger concern is what's going on with SLI...

I'm going to test the cards in a different system next (P200 S7) and see what happens. I'd love to hear suggestions for what else I could try. I'm not an electronics guru, I have no scope or fine soldering skills!

Thanks!