Hello everyone, I’m very happy to meet this community. I hope my question can be answered here.

I’ve rebuilt my retro system with the following specs: ASUS P3V 4X + Intel Pentium III 667MHz + nVidia Riva Vanta 16MB

Actually, the purpose of building this system is to run my Voodoo2 card, which has been sitting in storage for 23 years.

I have two Voodoo2 cards. Both are the same generic brand (APAC — I have no idea what brand that is). Let's say they are both reference cards. Both are 12MB. Let’s call them card A and card B.

I tried installing card A in the system — no problem (using the latest 3.02 driver downloaded from Phil’s Computer Lab website). Windows 98 detects it as a Voodoo2 Card and shows it in the Display Properties tab as V2-1000. This card runs smoothly and plays games well.

The problem appears when I plug in card B for SLI. The Display Properties shows the SLI signal as OK, but the memory of both cards can’t be detected. Windows becomes unstable, often freezing and crashing randomly. Last week I reinstalled Windows 98 5 times. Finally I gave up and admit I cannot find the problem of this Card B, other than hardware failure.

I’m quite puzzled about this, because 23 years ago, using the same two cards in SLI worked perfectly. Back then I used an Abit BH6 motherboard with a Celeron 566 and an ATI Rage Pro AGP (that great system was given away to a computer shop by my dad in 2011, sadly).

Then I tried testing them one by one. Card A still works fine when installed alone. The problem happens with card B when installed by itself. The system detects card B as a Voodoo2 Card, but in the Display Properties tab it shows as a 3Dfx Voodoo FX, with only 8MB memory (4MB + 4MB). I found that strange because I clearly remember this card being 12MB (it even has a “12MB” label printed on it). Anyway, when I tried playing FIFA 2000, the card had 3D rendering issues — polygon glitches. I tried with Diablo II 3Dtest.exe can pass card B performance, but it select nVidia Vanta as recommended card to play with. When I run Diablo II 3Dtest.exe on Card A, the test obviously choose 3Dfx Glide as recommended setting to play the game.

I tried asking ChatGPT, it suggested that the issue might be due to differences in how the ABIT BH6 and ASUS P3V 4X motherboards detect the card. ChatGPT conlusion is: Card B is Voodoo2 card, but identified falsely by the motherboard. That’s possible, since I haven’t found any other likely cause.

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Yesterday I tried to test them with 3dMark99 with 3rd party driver (FastVoodoo2 4.6). Yes card B obviously broken - same polygon glitches. I will post the picture later.

Still, I find it hard to accept, because card B looks physically much better than card A (my own card). The previous owner had only installed it in his PC but never actually used it, since he was using a Pentium 4 + GeForce 3 Ti at the time — obviously much faster and reliable than a Voodoo2. When after years, he wanted to upgrade to a Core2 Quad and asked me to sell his old PC, the Voodoo2 didn’t sell, so he just gave it to me.

So my question is: how to diagnose this Card B problem? Is that driver problem, ROM problem just just a broken card? Is there any diagnostic tool? I remember there was one, but I can’t seem to find it anywhere on the internet.

Sorry for long story. Any ideas gladly accepted.