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Topcat's 3DFX Voodoo 3500 Revival

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    Topcat's 3DFX Voodoo 3500 Revival

    This was a $25 ebay gamble. Seller said 'a capacitor is missing' and the card does not work.....well the card arrives, I discover 5 caps missing and 3 inductors missing. Poor handling at its finest!

    This is a comparison to a known good identical card, the top one is the good one, the bottom one was the gamble subject:





    Now to find the missing parts from junk..... The missing lytics were found in a faulty Matrox G450 card. The card had severe artifacting issues and wasn't worth messing with.....but tech haorder me just didn't trash it....it ended up in the junk bin....and lo & behold, it has the exact caps needed. Since the card didn't work, I tested the caps upon removal with my LC102, just to make sure they weren't the reason the card didn't work. The caps were spot-on.





    Now for the inductors.... I didn't have a clue what their Henry rating should be without desoldering the originals from the known good card and testing them with my inductor meter....I wasn't doing that, so I just decided to wing it and see what I could find. Well, it was a Dell GX520 motherboard that had them, right by the +12v ATV connector.



    Preparing for surgery!



    Donor parts harvested!





    Installed.





    POST tested and burn-in tested in an Abit VL6 with some Tualatin mods....I tested it in this not-very-valuable board, just incase something went *POOF*, I wasn't going to risk releasing the magic smoke from a good/valuable board.





    Since nothing went poof and the card seems to be working fine, it's now time for the real test! I installed it in the system that the working card came from, the S2DGU build from THIS THREAD. Since this system is already configured for this card, it'll make testing easy....



    Booted up to the desktop, no prob.....



    ...and the final test, nothing better than a little GLQuake!!



    This gamble paid off!! I have a build in mind for this little girl!!
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    #2
    Re: Topcat's 3DFX Voodoo 3500 Revival

    thats a beautiful surgery, doctor topcat! the patient for this case now has an excellent prognosis and should make a full recovery. the patient should have no trouble returning to work immediately after discharge from the hospital.

    i guess your gamble on performing risky surgery on the patient paid off big time. ah well... no guts no glory. if only i had the same luck with my patients as u do, dr topcat. no, my name is not dr death, dr chaos of death or dr death who killed michael jackson...

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      #3
      Re: Topcat's 3DFX Voodoo 3500 Revival

      wow topcat amazing fix
      My Computer: AMD Ryzen 9 3900X, Asrock X370 Killer SLI/AC, 32GB G.SKILL TRIDENT Z RGB DDR4 3200, 500GB WD Black NVME and 2TB Toshiba HD,Geforce RTX 3080 FOUNDERS Edition, In-Win 303 White, EVGA SuperNova 750 G3, Windows 10 Pro

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        #4
        Re: Topcat's 3DFX Voodoo 3500 Revival

        I love it!!! Great repair!

        And this thread is a good example of why I always keep spare junk PCBs around.

        Originally posted by Topcat View Post
        This was a $25 ebay gamble. Seller said 'a capacitor is missing' and the card does not work.....well the card arrives, I discover 5 caps missing and 3 inductors missing. Poor handling at its finest!
        Yup, I can't tell you how many video cards I've received with missing parts - even ones that were supposedly "tested and guaranteed working". The latest one was an MSI Radeon HD3870 with a ripped track and two missing config resistors. Guaranteed it would NOT have been working if I tested it as is. But I never did - I simply fixed it and carried along as if I had received it working. Didn't even bother messaging the seller. It seems to be a moot point. Most folks just don't know how to handle electronics and there is nothing I can do about that.

        Originally posted by Topcat View Post
        Now for the inductors.... I didn't have a clue what their Henry rating should be without desoldering the originals from the known good card and testing them with my inductor meter....I wasn't doing that, so I just decided to wing it and see what I could find.
        Those rectangular SMD inductors are usually just ferrite "beads", so not much inductance on them. They can often be replaced with a jumper / solder bridge without any adverse effects.

        Now if this was a buck voltage regulator of some sort... yeah, you'd definitely want to get that inductance right or at least within a very reasonable ballpark. Fortunately, many old cards like this VooDoo use linear regulators for just about everything (or parts straight-connected to PSU rails.) So that makes things a lot easier to fix.

        Originally posted by Topcat View Post
        ...and the final test, nothing better than a little GLQuake!!

        https://www.badcaps.net/forum/attach...1&d=1582138634
        **Drools**
        This is AWESOME!

        I always wondered how the old Need For Speed series would look on these cards. I think everything up to Porsche 2000 / Porsche Unlimited still had 3DFX/glide support (and some had graphics options that supposedly weren't even available with D3D modes.)

        I really ought to get my VooDoo3 3000 fixed.
        If anyone has/sees any old hardware with Micron Technology MT48LC1M16A1-6SE RAM chips, please PM me. I have a cracked one on my card... again, due to mishandling from whoever had it before me. So I need to replace one of those memory chips. I think they are 16 Mb chips running at 166 MHz (6 ns?)
        Last edited by momaka; 02-21-2020, 11:27 PM.

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          #5
          Re: Topcat's 3DFX Voodoo 3500 Revival

          Just a FWIW, I stuck this card in my dual SL4KL build, as rare as those CPU's are it seemed a worthy candidate. Very period-specific as well.
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            #6
            Re: Topcat's 3DFX Voodoo 3500 Revival

            Reminds me of when I had Need For Speed III on my Athlon T-bird systems.

            IIRC, Need For Speed III (1998) has Glide support.
            ASRock B550 PG Velocita

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            "¡Me encanta "Me Encanta o Enlistarlo con Hilary Farr!" -Mí mismo

            "There's nothing more unattractive than a chick smoking a cigarette" -Topcat

            "Today's lesson in pissivity comes in the form of a ziplock baggie full of GPU extension brackets & hardware that for the last ~3 years have been on my bench, always in my way, getting moved around constantly....and yesterday I found myself in need of them....and the bastards are now nowhere to be found! Motherfracker!!" -Topcat

            "did I see a chair fly? I think I did! Time for popcorn!" -ratdude747

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              #7
              Re: Topcat's 3DFX Voodoo 3500 Revival

              I played a bunch of Q3A on it this afternoon against the AI (which for the time was pretty good).....I am rusty with FPS's.
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                #8
                Re: Topcat's 3DFX Voodoo 3500 Revival

                Halo Custom Edition is a very good one, if you update to the 2014 patch, which brings it to 1.0.10.

                Then you also will have online options. Usually, the only deal-breaker, would be, if we lose IP version 4...

                But it's modern enough that you would want at least 1-point-something Ghz.

                (Also at least 1 GB of RAM, usually) (And at least 512 MB of VRAM) (At least, when using 1080p)

                Halo Custom Edition works well with a 45nm Core 2 Duo rig. Especially a motherboard with the P45 chipset.

                But, this is beyond the capabilities of the hardware you have been reviving.
                Halo 1x is DirectX 9-based, albeit it looks like there's fall-back options for pixel shader 1x.

                Yes, Halo 1x is quirky, but generally high quality.

                With Halo Custom Edition stock maps, it looks a lot like you only have to change the video card to one that supports at least pixel shader 1x. It seems that the quality of the internet service, (nothing to do with bandwidth, usually) matters the most! If you get packet loss, you will notice it in online dedicated server multiplayer. Halo 1x uses UDP for online multiplayer.
                Last edited by RJARRRPCGP; 02-29-2020, 12:25 AM.
                ASRock B550 PG Velocita

                Ryzen 9 "Vermeer" 5900X

                16 GB AData XPG Spectrix D41

                Sapphire Nitro+ Radeon RX 6750 XT

                eVGA Supernova G3 750W

                Western Digital Black SN850 1TB NVMe SSD

                Alienware AW3423DWF OLED




                "¡Me encanta "Me Encanta o Enlistarlo con Hilary Farr!" -Mí mismo

                "There's nothing more unattractive than a chick smoking a cigarette" -Topcat

                "Today's lesson in pissivity comes in the form of a ziplock baggie full of GPU extension brackets & hardware that for the last ~3 years have been on my bench, always in my way, getting moved around constantly....and yesterday I found myself in need of them....and the bastards are now nowhere to be found! Motherfracker!!" -Topcat

                "did I see a chair fly? I think I did! Time for popcorn!" -ratdude747

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