First post, by AngieAndretti
After a year on eBay, I'm finally a very new owner of a Voodoo 5 5500 AGP. It's in excellent condition visually, with stock fans that look really clean but they do make a bit of extra noise.
I've installed the card into my 1.4GHz Tualatin Pentium III rig, running Win98SE uSP3.
Initial driver is 3Dfx reference driver, version 1.4.000.
The card scored 4997 in 3DMark 2000 (1024x768,16bit) with all default driver settings.
This is my first Voodoo 5 so I'm not sure what's considered normal but I do feel like it runs rather hot for a card with active cooling.
Measured on the backside of the PCB, I saw temps as high as 58C during 3DMark benchmark and it seems to idle around 53C. Is that normal for this card?
I'm open to suggestions on what driver I should run for best performance with this card, and also your thoughts on whether I should attempt to remove the stock heatsinks and re-paste them with a modern thermal transfer compound like Kryonaut. I read a Wiki page that suggested the stock thermal compound was often applied really poorly on these Voodoo 5 cards, and that simply re-pasting the stock hardware could greatly improve thermals even while keeping the stock look of the card. I believe they suggested putting the card in the freezer before attempting to break the seal of the original compound.
What do you guys think on the driver, the current thermals, and/or a heatsink re-paste?