Hey guys.. Original owner of 2 perfectly working STB V2 12MB cards that worked great for years.. Then i get the itch to build an old school gamer rig and run the V2 SLI again and i now have a prob with one of the V2 cards.

I norrowed it down to just one of the 2 cards. I was testing it out using an old graphics bench program called 3dmark2000.

Durring the test i see Pink or purple and sometimes blue dots in the backgound sky in the first test.. Also alot of white grids around on other objects.

Please see the pics and you can clearly see it.










I've also tried Quake2 runing glide and all the textures have dark dots.


Flipping me out hardcore i tell ya.. i've spent the past 2 days solid so far lookin the card over with a loop and see nothing wrong with the card.. Could it be a bad memory chip.. loose pin leg on the GPU or simply a bad cap?

I now have a bad 8MB STB card i could use as a donner card.. as i bought what was supposed to be a 12MB STB card off ebay recently just for the PCI Bracket and i got a 8MB busted up card.
Is it just toast??

EDIT:  I forgot to add that i'm using the default drivers right off the original STB instlal disk.

First thing i tried today.. Dont know if the program is really working though. I tried it down to 80 and even raised it to 100 and didnt see any difference.. i even rebooted to see if the program needed to reboot to set the timings.

The program is called voodoo2_tweaker.exe Beta 1999

made by Christian Leinen

Leinen Software Development

Know of any other overclocking program i can use?

Ok tested some more and if i go 80Mhz the dot pattern will start after a min.. At 75Mhz its fine.

isint the default clock on v2's 80Mhz?

Well then.. i'm thinking its not overheating then. Could it possably be that the caps are bad and not providing enough juice to run the card higher then 75Mhz??

Screw it.. i'll just sell off the good one "boxed" complete. maybe sell the going bad one to someone if someone wants it to repair or they want 2 boxed for there collection.

I'm also going to list up 2 8MB V2 Diamond Monster 3D cards boxed as well.

I'll just stick with 3dfx games on the v5 5500 on the other computer for now.

Check ebay for 3dfx cards and you'l find them as i'm gona either list them tonight or tomorrow afternoon.

What CPU do you have in that computer ? If that's a fast CPU with more than 700 MHz, it could be the problem, there were quite a few batch of early V2s that have problems with fast CPU, and what's worse, the problem don't go even if you cool the board.

Could you check that V2 on a P2 cpu ?

eclypse wrote on 08.08.08 at 04:23:48:

The Voodoo 2 has clock-synced GPUs and RAM, the first 3dfx-card to support different clock speeds for GPU and RAM was the Banshee.

m14radu wrote on 08.08.08 at 17:32:24:

Haha, why ? Problems with V5 overclocking ? 

Now ontopic. ecypse, in the first post you say that you want to build a oldschool gamer rig, well, sorry to say, but athlon xp is NOT oldschool, I'll never understand those who try to put old cards on moden motherboards and cpus. First, you'll run into operating system problems, 2000, XP and Vista don't like very much Voodoo2, all drivers lacks for those OS greatly lacks functionality, and 98 doesn't like new motherboard and is limited to 512 mb memory.

As for the "how old is the V2", there should be a date on the board, something like 9835, where 98 is the year amd 35 is the month of the year, when the card was made. Anyway, an older card could still be stable and a newer not, there's a few things that can cause some V2 to overheat. The only way to find ot is to test in a proper computer (old cpu), but I'm afraid that since it need to be clocked so lower (75 MHz), somethis is damaged on the board, most probably some pieces of RAM.