Can't answer your question, sorry, but I would go with the faster chip.

But how did you determine that that chip was the bad one? I have some defective cards laying around and would love to know..

It's a long story, but to sum it up, I had switched mem banks around for the TMU that was affected by the corrupted texturing. That helped me to pinpoint mem bank with a bad DRAM, from there I simply did a classic temperature related troubleshooting on each chip untill I found the faulty one.

If you have some dying Voodoo's, create a separate post for them with detailed description of the problem(s), I might be able to help.

Bought 5 pcs. of 100MHz EliteMT DRAM on ebay, I hope those are not rebranded 30 or 35ns pieces 😀

Please update us when you get them 😀

No problem, it just going to take a while.

I put some similar ebay bought M11B416256A-25J chips on a Voodoo 2 8mb card to upgrade it to 12mb - the additional memory seems to work fine, though I haven't overclocked the card at all.

After almost 1.5 month due, the DRAM ICs finally arrived. Every chip came from a different batch, because none of the date code on them match, but parts are legit and working.

Replaced the crossed out DRAM IC, but texturing errors still remain. There is at least one more bad DRAM somewhere around the affected TMU 😵

Original picture:

DRAM IC is removed:

DRAM IC is replaced, ground textures are as it should be now:

After replacing DRAM, most of the textures in Quake are now displayed correctly.

Nice job! What was the temp difference between a good and a bad chip?

There was no exceptional temp. difference among good and bad DRAMs, unfortunately. DRAMs closer to the FBI and TMU were always hotter.

Second bad DRAM was on bank0 (on TMU side) and it was semi good, which made it way harder to pinpoint, so after some testing and reasoning I've concluded that it must be somewhere on bank0. Because it didn't cause any texture flickering, like the crossed out DRAM (cooling remaining DRAMs, made no visual difference), I had to desolder DRAMs one by one and test them on a video card with DRAM sockets.

In conclusion, there were 2 bad DRAMs (U19 and U2) on both banks, I had relocated U1 to U2 so that freshly tinned DRAMs wouldn't stick out visually on the card too much.

Perfect quake texturing:

I had this Voodoo for almost 12 years, glad that I didn't try to fix it earlier, because I thought that texture corruption was caused by a faulty TMU back then.

That's a shame, not willing to remove several chips just to find it out. I have several defective v2's , some I used some tiny parts from. Some don't work at all and some have artifacts.
I also have 11 working cards (7 boxed) so there is no real need to fix any.

But I have 2 sets of Creative 12mb cards in use and one of the cards has a tiny square in the upper left corner that is corrupted that I would like to fix. When using it in sli it is not noticeable and I guess it is a memory problem. Would have been nice to being able to pinpoint which chip it is.

Looks a bit like this: only in single card (did this with paint to give an example)

Nice work! I've got an 8MB Creative card that does the same thing. Glad to know it's a fixable problem. Where'd you get the RAM chips?

meljor wrote:

one of the cards has a tiny square in the upper left corner that is corrupted

It doesn't look like a typical, TMU memory related, texture corruption. What happens with the square when you set active only 1 TMU or disable texturing using environment variables? Post actual screenshots of the games.

xjas wrote:

Where'd you get the RAM chips?

China, via ebay. Though, before buying, I'd ask them to include ICs from the same batch only, that was an unpleasant surprise.

Will test in a while and get back to it, the coming days I don't have the time to test. Would be interesting if we could find the problem! It seems like a tiny problem so the card should be reparable.
Thanx for the help...