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.

http://home.comcast.net/~darkeclypse/V2Prob1.JPG

http://home.comcast.net/~darkeclypse/V2Prob2.JPG

http://home.comcast.net/~darkeclypse/V2Prob3.JPG

http://home.comcast.net/~darkeclypse/v2prob4.JPG


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.

Problems with textures almost always translates in bad video memory. Try installing voodoo2 oc and lower the frequency clocks from 90 to 85 or even 80 and see if the problem persist.

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?

WAIT A MINUTE!!! I just down clocked the card to 60Mhz and its totally fine now?

85Mhz showed major crap on the screen..

Wow.. what the freak!

So what the heck could be causing this prob? I dont think i ever flashed the bios way back when with overclocked clocks.

Is there any program i could use to read the bios to see if its clocked higher?

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?

Default clock is 90MHz.

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??

Definately looks like the problematic card has BAD RAM.

The reason that it works at a lower frequency is that if one (or more) of the RAM chips are bad, then they cannot handle the default frequency that they were "supposed" to run at.

By lowering the frequency you're decreasing the workload on the RAM - so (eventually) it's able to handle it.

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.

paulpsomiadis wrote on 08.08.08 at 04:19:27:

Definately looks like the problematic card has BAD RAM. The reason that it works at a lower frequency is that if one (or more) of the RAM chips are bad, then they cannot handle the default frequency that they were "supposed" to run at. By lowering the frequency you're decreasing the workload on the RAM - so (eventually) it's able to handle it.

Oh.. I didnt know the overclocking program was changing the clock on the ram.. i thought it was the GPU.  Well if thats the case i doubt theres a way to check the memory for the bad one.

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 ?

Well i could but not tonight.. I have a bare P3 slot 1 system i could try it on but no hdd, so it would take a while to get that runing.

Could you tell by the serial number if its an early v2?  i mean i have 2 cards that i'm sure are close in serial numbers as i bought them around the same time and ones fine and the other is not.

The rig i was trying these on is a AMD XP2600+ clocked atm around 2000Mhz.. Was runing it at 2650Mhz before the summer.

The other rig i have runing the V5 5500 in is a AMD XP runing at i believe 2000-2200Mhz.

eclypse wrote on 08.08.08 at 04:23:48:

Oh.. I didnt know the overclocking program was changing the clock on the ram.. i thought it was the GPU.

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. ;)

and unfortunatelly the last !  >:( >:( >:(

m14radu wrote on 08.08.08 at 17:32:24:

and unfortunatelly the last !  >:( >:( >:(

Haha, why ? Problems with V5 overclocking ?  :-X

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.

Right on ! V5 overclocking  ;)

 Well 3 out of 4 cards are good.. i know forsure that the Diamond Monster 3D 8MB V2 card is older then the STB 12MB cards i have and its totally fine.  

 As i said, the 2 STB V2 cards were bought around the same time if not the same day and one is fine in this system at the standard clocks.

  So as you said, either the GPU or a memory chip on its way out is the cause.. I still think its a weak cap or 2 on the board thats not getting enough juice to the chips thats causing the prob.

Either way its all going on ebay in a few hours today.

eclypse:
"I was testing it out using an old graphics bench program called 3dmark2000."
(...)
"I forgot to add that i'm using the default drivers right off the original STB instlal disk"


"3DMark 2000" is for DirectX 7.0 - be sure that your drivers from STB are for DX7.