Hm, the original Manufacters probably only sell in large amounts (e.g. 1000 Packs), and they likely don't have these old RAM's in Stock anymore.

It's probably really the best to use it off other (possibly defective = cheap) Cards.
(hoping their owners maybe killed the GPU, but not the RAM)

So in the end, that might leave us checking all Cards of that time Period (~2000) that used the same RAM as the Voodoo4/5 Cards.

....and then EMailing dozens (hundreds?) of EBay sellers, which are selling them to find out if they have the right RAM Modules on their Cards.

PS.
I'll check my Collection in 2 days (got 24hrs shift tomorrow) to summarize what suitable RAM I might find on them.

Since IMHO the Bios Releases for the Voodoo4/5 were independent from the RAM used on them, we should have  a small series of generally compatible Modules.
Chances are, some of those were built in large volumes on other Cards as well (e.g. in special I'm thinking cheap OEM Cards using not the lastest Tech, like SiS series Boards of 2000 to 2001 or alike)

Quote:


*ugh* , let's rather settle to solder around and defunc some NVidia Boards, than killing a nice Radeon 7000

As far as I can tell, the GF2 and Radeon 7x00 series only made it to 64MB RAM; GF3 and Radeon 8500 were the first to offer 128MB.
But with the right number of Chips (= correct Capacity per Chip) it would not matter.

....although....technically....
...wouldn't it be strange to have a unique 3dfx Voodoo5 5500 Pro/XT 8) 128MB..."powered by NVidia" ?!

/ me stops exercising deeper RAM Philosophy now, and goes to bed

pricewatch.com --> go under sdram, lots of cards there, could be the ones under the 64 mb section, cant see if all memory is on front or not, plus what mempry they have is the pin out ok? someone stated it had to be the same before and im not to tech inclined lol

ok last post lol, now if this memory worked it could take care of 2 cards, not too bad, its fairly cheap and brand new --> http://store5.yimg.com/I/memx_1797_31031757

So many questions

1. just experiment with stuff till they work.. heh
i did the hardware mod a couple of week prior to getting the bios to properly initialize the extra ram modules.

It's a logic thing, a bios source code is no different than php source code, once you get the drift of what those 3dfx programmers did, and where/how they did it, it's rather easy to figure these things out.

2. Well my mod was to simply add 32mb [4x8mb chips] to the empty slots on the reference V4 design.

But now VDX wants me to do the never-before-attempted 128mb V5 mod, which goes for exchanging the 4x16mb chips with 4x32mb chips,
[much harder, mind you ]

3. "If you can exchange the existing with bigger ones it would be the easiest - but I think it may be tricky."
quite the contrary my friend, initializing 4 extra slots is a hell lot easier than trying to convince the bios that it has more memory than it's supposed to.
And the routines on that V5 for memory management aren't the cleanest iv'e seen so far. [not that iv'e seen so much.. anyway]

I never actually /had/ a voodoo5, to be perfectly honest

BTW
stupid me.. i went all over the web searching for the sources of V5's 1.18 bioses.. and the whole time it was sitting in my 3dfx_source folder =\

DenisF smacks self

I could imagine, worst case the only way might be to actually use the same amount of Modules, but only have their address range being used to 50%.
That may end up using up 256MB on a 128MB Card.

But since the Voodoo4 also has one design using only 50% of available RAM positions, it might be as simple as a line of Bios Code.