Doornkaat wrote on 2020-12-11, 22:01:
Agree to disagree on the feebleness of Voodoos. Give them decent airflow and they're fine, that's my opinion.
VSA100 cards have VRM circuitry that often needs some tending to by now, the main chips especially on the AGP cards seem pretty sturdy to me though.
Yeah, who knows, I might have been very unlucky, but I had three Voodoo cards die on me (one on the shelf in an antistatic bag - VRAM gone bad, and two inside computers with more than enough airflow). I was able to fix two of them, the third one (a Voodoo 3 PCI) is probably gone forever. At the time, I had failed to realize that the power MOSFET on Voodoo 3 PCI cards gets extremely hot, even hotter than the actual chip... so it basically exploded, destroying a good chunk of the PCB. Since then, I always stick a heatsink on that MOSFET and ensure that multiple fans are blowing on the whole card.
kolderman wrote on 2020-12-12, 06:57:
IMO a v5 needs a fast athlon xp driving it.
To each his own, I guess. But it's strange to me to pair a mediocre card from 2000 (yeah, I said it!), with a pretty powerful CPU from 2002/2003 😀
Then again, I pair 2003/2004 cards with 2010 CPUs... so who am I to talk? 😁
Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2020-12-12, 02:47:
A nice cooling option for a Voodoo card is to add one of these brackets to the PCI slot below it:
Put two 120mm Noctua fans in there and you have a solid, quiet solution which cools the entire area of the card.
Ha, I thought I was the only one crazy enough to use those (although, sorry, no Noctua fans - too expensive) 😀 Also, my bracket only supports 80 and probably 90mm fans.
Here are some pics of the PC I'm currently playing with - Creative 3D Blaster Voodoo Banshee PCI / Pentium MMX 233 MHz OC @ 266 MHz (and this card doesn't even get that hot, compared to others, so talk about overkill cooling 😁 ):
1 x PLCC-68 / 2 x PGA132 / 5 x Skt 3 / 9 x Skt 7 / 12 x SS7 / 1 x Skt 8 / 14 x Slot 1 / 5 x Slot A
5 x Skt 370 / 8 x Skt A / 2 x Skt 478 / 2 x Skt 754 / 3 x Skt 939 / 7 x LGA775 / 1 x LGA1155
Current PC: Ryzen 7 5800X3D
Backup PC: Core i7 7700k