I could be wrong, but this definitely looks like a hardware issue.

From my (limited) experience with Voodoo 1 cards, it is very common for one or more legs of the TMU and FBI chips to have come loose from their solder joint. They appear to be straight and connected but if you use a magnifier and wiggle a sewing needle between them one will be loose or at the very least it will come loose with almost no force at all. I have found half a dozen legs loose on a single chip that otherwise looked totally fine and intact. My guess is that in 1996-1997 something about the board design and soldering methods were not up to snuff yet for chips that get as hot as these to withstand lots of heating\cooling cycles. These were really some of the first consumer chips that got anywhere near that hot (aside from CPUs).

If you are unfamiliar with soldering, I would recommend to have someone experienced take a look at it if you find some loose legs on the chips. I have attempted repairs on loose TMU\FBI legs with a normal soldering iron and it can range from a 5 second job to a nightmare depending on whether you end up accidentally soldering multiple legs together. I think a hot air station would probably be best for this, but some experience is still highly recommended to avoid cooking the board\chips.

Aside from that, it could also be capacitors if the card uses surface mount aluminum caps (little silver and black cylinders). If it has tantalum caps (yellow or black rectangles) they are probably not the issue unless one completely fried or failed but that tends to prevent a device from working at all (still worth checking them for shorts at least).

Yes, it uses the old style silver capacitors

This is too precise for me to even try to solder anything there (would be more on "nightmare" part of your scale 🤣)

Forgot to mentioned, it seems to be ColorMaster Voodoomania card

You can set PII 450 as 4.5 x 66 = 300 MHz. 450 MHz is too high for Voodoo 1.

I have the same model of Voodoo 1 and it had loose pins on both 3dfx chips.

My card was not detected until I re-soldered the loose pins.Now it works fine.

Have a look at Jaton Voodoo 2 - 12MB not working [REPAIRED]. It's a repair for a Voodoo 2 but similar issues. You can see what is involved in getting it going. A microscope and soldering iron is needed.

Thanks guys, I left the card at some local guy who is fixing graphics card. I also noticed one of the capacitors was replaced (looks new and soldering is different than the other ones) - this may be the culprit.

I was thinking about running it at 66MHz FSB (or switching the CPU to 350 as I have one spare) but decided against it - too many stories of people able to run it on P3 and P4 systems. Also, missing memory is not likely caused by the PCI/CPU combo

Got the card back from local guy who is fixing motherboard and gpus - now it's totally dead - bogus number of TMUs 🙁

He was able to get the TMU memory right by resoldering loose legs, but card was still not working.

He also found a dead resistor and ferrite bead for TMU - after replacing those it showed bogus number of TMUs. I asked to reflow both chips but still the same. He mentioned TMU seems bloated on the bottom part and it's probably dead

Well, I tried to bring it back, now have to look for another card, preferably voodoo 2

Can you post a new high-res photo of the card (after the botched repair attempt)? Seems to me like your "local guy" might've made the situation worse. 😀

Sure:
TMU:

FBI:

Other stuff that was touched