Recently [Bits und Bolts] stumbled over a pair of Dragon 3000 branded 3dfx Voodoo 2 cards in his unfixed cards pile, and decided that the best course of action was to not only fix them, but also run them in SLI for some sweet Unreal Tournament action. Naturally, these cards being in the broken cards pile meant that he first had to figure out why they were broken and fix all issues.
The advantage of having two identical Voodoo 2 cards is of course that any missing components, like some resistors on one card, could be referenced on the other card. Beyond that it was mostly a matter of reflowing clearly corroded pins on the ICs and replacing damaged resistors and resistor arrays before the first tests could be run.
Using the mojo utility it was easy enough to spot that there were still some lingering issues, with clear issues visible in 3D games as well. These were tracked down to a dodgy pin on one of the texture mapping units (TMUs) that needed some more reflowing, and a very sneaky resistor array that was cracked but not obviously so until prodded with a multimeter.
With both cards now making happy noises when individually tested, it was time to go full SLI, fire up the Pentium 2 system and enjoy the glory of 24 MB of VRAM at high resolutions in Unreal Tournament. Considering that the bloke who had sent in these cards had found them while cleaning up a shed, it’s quite amazing how little rework was needed to once again party like it’s 1999.
i remember those cards! I was earning $6/hr working overnight at an ISP dealing with the chance of server problems that never actually happened. i had to settle for S3 Virge of course!
S3 Virge wasnt that much cheaper than Voodoo1 when both released. Both Voodoo1 and Virge announced 1995 Comdex.
Virge shipping started in May 1996 E3 $199 2MB cards.
Voodoo1 shipping started October 1996 $299 4MB cards. Flood began after 1997 ram price correction down to $199.
Finally! A hack!
Definitely not a hack. SLI mode was a standard feature on Voodoo 2. The rest is just a simple repair.
Finally! A hack!
repair is hack adjacent, in that it sticks it to the man in a forced obsolescence world, so only a hack in the spiritual sense. a hack proper would be one of those crazy builds that merges 2 voodoo2s and a 2d card into a single board (even using pcie and a modern video port). and those exist on youtube.
I ran a build with 2 Of the 12mb Monster 3d II cards which are the same as these just different name, oddly when dad and I bought the first 12mb one second hand at the local computer store it had the special ribbon cable to link 2 cards but the second one we bought in box didnt. When we looked at the manual we saw what the cable was for and both looked at each other knowing what we had to do lol. Main reason i got the first one was for ultraHLE nintendo 64 emulator that bursted on the scene and the good old FPS games we had back then. Paired with both of those 12mb 3DFX cards was a Matrox Mystique g200 with tv out and it came with 8mb but we lucked out and found one with the extra memory module on it for 16mb. Back then with a overclocked pentium 3 slot 1 cpu and 28mb of video memory was awesome and with TV out we could link to tv while playing games even back then, N64 emulator ran better than a 64 and several games were way better. God i miss the small computer “junk” shops of the 90’s and early 2000’s, was so great and could find anything plus deals on new stuff. Back when you actually could go to a small store for that was a cool time, crazy deals but you had to be in know just to get in some of em.
Repairing a pair to repair them in a pair for SLI action is TIGHT!
yet another voodoo2 repair video. was hoping for one of those crazy rebuilds with a new board.
The Vodoo 1 and 2 were both monumental graphic cards, with the Voodoo 1 being the first decent GPU made available to the public, and the Voodoo 2 then reknocking everyone’s socks off. At the time, the nVidia cards were polygon cracking crap.
The loss of 3DFx was tragic. : (
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ooLO2xeyJZA
VooDoo rush was buggy but still decent.
I chased a single card VooDoo rush for the ISA feature connector for my VFX1.
Never worked right…Even though the rush could render in 256 color mode.
Slotting a Voodoo2 into my PC back in ~1998 was the single most potent upgrade I have ever done, or will ever do in my life. For $300 and 15 minutes of effort, it probably ~tripled my FPS. I was 14 yrs old and will never get that rush again.
Voodoo2 stories will always bring me back to that moment.