Look for bent pins around the TMU chips, wires that are bent together so they touch. It's common enough. Happened to me. I used a knife edge and separated them and straightened them out without breaking the contacts and the card works perfectly fine now for me.

FFXIhealer wrote:

Look for bent pins around the TMU chips, wires that are bent together so they touch. It's common enough. Happened to me. I used a knife edge and separated them and straightened them out without breaking the contacts and the card works perfectly fine now for me.

I can't seem to locate any shorting pins on the TMU chips or bad caps. Here are the front and back photos of the card.

Can you see anything I missed?

Here are some really detailed closeups of the front of the card. The only damage I can see is superficial chipping to one of the TMU's sides..

And here are shots of the back. Only one major scratch in an area with no traces.

Test it on single texturing and in multitexturing apps, so you'll figure out is second assembly tmu/men working correctly or no. Texture garbage may be produced either faulty tmu or ram

So iiuc, you sold a v2 and the buyer reported these issues. Is the card at this moment back in your hands now? Or is the buyer sending you all these pics and this information?

appiah4 wrote:

Here are some really detailed closeups of the front of the card. The only damage I can see is superficial chipping to one of the TMU's sides..

It might be the light or the angle, but 3rd pic bottom 2 corners, some legs seem to not go anywhere? Worth a check.

All the images and videos were sent by the buyer to me. I have refunded him and the card is on its way back to me, should be in my hands tomorrow.

The legs seem attached to the PCB, the angle is misleading but I will visually inspect tomorrow.

I will test it on multi and single texture apps as recommended. The issue in my mind is the PC I have set up atm is a Voodoo 3 AGP, if I add this and install the drivers would they conflict? Also how do I make sure the game runs on the V2 and not V3?

connect monitor directly to v2 and test it in dos

anthony wrote:

connect monitor directly to v2 and test it in dos

I'll add the card as a PCI, do the passthrough, boot to MSDOS with a Win98SE boot disk, then run a DOS Glide game from the hard drive.

What games should I use? GLQuake for multitexture I suppose, what about single texturing?

Carma is good. But afaik every dos game for voodoo is single texturing

The card is now in my hands. At two points, two of the legs looked slightly bent and dangerously close (although not in contact as far as I could tell), one of them was on a TMU and the other was on the pixel processor. I straightened both.

There is also some chipping on one of the TMUs, I don't know how critical this is but I have a feeling that if this were to cause an issue it would have been more severe? Or could this be the reason and the card is toast? (Maybe I can use it as a single TMU card, a faster Voodoo 1 if you will, via some registry settings?)

I still think it's a RAM thing though, the STB board uses 90MHz ram running at 90MHz so it has very little room for silicon degradation, I have a feeling running it at 80MHz would fix most issues. Plan is to add the card to my PIII tonight, boot to MSDOS via Win98 boot disk, run Descent II D2_3dfx..