Hey all,

I'm having trouble with my Voodoo5. It's extremely sensitive to drivers and changing settings in the 3dfx tools panel.

For example it will not work with any driver other than 3dhq's and  it only works with the glide splash screen turned off in 3dhq's driver (yet it still displays the logo sometimes).

Even the 3dfx WHQL drivers do not work. The DirectX (version 6 through 9) Direct3D Diagnostic spinning box locks up with this driver unless I run in "Single Chip Only" mode.

All is fine with the 3DHQ drivers however it still locks up a lot when starting anything 3D. When it succesfully starts a game it runs rock solid with 4xaa and other sli modes.

When I just bought it (3 years ago) I never had this trouble with it, all drivers worked, except I always had to turn off GuardBand Clipping which still is the case (wtf is it anyway, never got it to work, had to manually regedit to disable it with 3dfx official drivers).

So, does anyone know what could be wrong with the card? I've tried 3 different motherboards/cpu's and 3 different OS (Windows 95, 98 and 2000) .

Maybe a capacitor or other thing is damaged?

BTW some DOS games (not glide, just ones with low resolutions) have garbage all over the screen, this has always been the case tho.

Long post, sorry, but I've been busy with this a lot and also asked for help at 3dfxzone.it but they've been unable to help me so far.

Thanks in advance,
Justin

I suppose you are the same user of this discussion: http://www.3dfxzone.it/enboard/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=18533

Well, as far as I know, those tiny SMD and polymer capacitors all around the BGAs are there for filtering purpose and don't affect operation so much. If we are speaking of those big poly-caps, they are part of the power plane of the board; if bad they could give some instability but not ncessarily.

In my humble opinion, the problems you described could more likely due to the two BGAs chips.

Quote:


Are those dos games running under 2D or 3D environments?

In the 3dfxzone's thread I read at some point you changed the PSU. Did you notice if the card started to act differently after the PSU change? Better or Worse?

I don't know if we'll come with an happy end, but we can try to understand the cause of this behaviour. Please post a good picture of the card and the PSU sticker.

Pictures taken;

http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/207/rightyd.jpg/
http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/249/powercloseup.jpg/
http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/220/powerle.jpg/

Let me know if you need pictures of specific parts of the card or more information.

Come on guys, can you at least tell me if you see anything bad on the card?

Thanks for reply, I already checked the card in other mainboards. I think what you see on CR2 and CR3 is a bit contact spray I used on the agp slot. Too bad the dents on c90 are no problem, then i couldve have it fixed.

Also I was wrong at post 1 when I said 3dhq's driver only worked. It's x3dfx not 3dhq.