I wouldn't be so dismissive of the difficulty of this. It was easy for you because you've developed your abilities to the point that you can successfully perform this repair, but it is certainly not easy. Great job again on resurrecting another precious Voodoo. You're doing God's work! Love your content!
The microscope helps a lot! The repair didn't require any electronics knowledge, but the area is very small. I am glad the repair was a success! Every 3Dfx card saved is worth the effort.
It's 90% equipment and 10% skill, all you really need is some basic experience with soldering and steady hand. without microscope, this repair would be close to impossible unless you have hawk's eyes transplanted.
@@bitsundbolts The 8Mb mod ... I don't understand it....... If you are bridging (or piggybacking) the data address pins of both.. original and additional chips............ well.. the additional chips will have an identical copy of the same data...... the new chips will have in them exactly the same 4Mb of data that the originals...... they do not store additional data............ in other words.. the GPU can not store additional data in the new chips.... because it do not have new additional traces to store or read from them... i think 🤔...
I have been an electronics hobbyist on and off for about 30 years now. But I have almost only worked with through-hole stuff. I could NOT solder what you just did on that card! Awesome job mate, well done repairing that card!
Thank you! Without the microscope, I wouldn't be able to do this type of work. I just need to replace the camera and light to improve the quality. Thanks for watching!
Great repair! Since the card is working, I personally would not replace the pins. I would fear the pads lifting (more) from the PCB or the remaining part of the original pins breaking from the chip.
It is so nice to these these cards again. Back in the days I wanted something that rendered in true Open GL, so I skipped the Voodoos. I was using a professional ELSA Gloria XXL with Windows NT 4.0 instead. The card was great for 3D Studio and CAD but not so awesome for games. I was always a bit jealous of the people that could run Quake and Unreal so well 😁 After the ELSA i went straight for a Geforce 256, but it is difficult to forget how important the Voodoos were and how fast Glide was for gaming. You did a great repair there, very neat!
Fanastic job! Regads the pin fixes, I would go with super fine wires rather than replacement legs - the reason is if they get knocked, they could break off further where you then need to grind the chip edge away to fix. Fine wires on those points, perhaps covered by UV solder mask paint would be fine and a lot less likely to get damaged from knocks etc.
It's a pleasure to see fellow 3dfx fans doing the same thing. I recently fixed a Diamond Monster 3D II with one corner pin missing on the FBI. The metal was not long enough so I dug a tiny channel upwards with the tweezers and soldered on a piece of wire. The card came back alive just fine. Save these relics, one at a time!
Don't worry about mixing up ferrite beed with inductor. Ferrite beed also belongs to inductors but has more specialised task. It's often used to stop high frequency oscillations passing through to the power line. Unless currents are really high typical SMD inductor can do this job just fine. We all live and learn.
Great microsoldering job! Those lifted pins looked like they suffered some physical damage as some were not even touching the pads. Maybe whoever tried to fix those corner was there to fix those ones too? Anyways very nice to see a card like that saved from the bin!
Handy tip. You can harvest thin enamel wire from old laptop or PC cooling fans. Also you can safely remove a small amount of the encapsulation plastic if the broken stub is too small to solder to.
I may have to remove some of the plastic. When I pressed on the memory boards, the solder joints on the chip broke. It was a quick fix, but clearly the sturdy replacement pins and weak connection to the stubs aren't a good combination. For now, I am very careful with the card, but I may mix it into another video which requires pin replacement and mention the issues with my approach in this video.
That looked really difficult. I wouldn't change the pins for wires, if it's working I wouldn't touch it again. This reminded me I have a 386 with a missing pin that I have to fix sometime :S I love the Vogons community.
L10 is the component which was missing on my Diamond Monster 3D card as well. It supplies power from the 5v rail to one of the PLL inside of the ICS5342 GENDAC. The datasheet for this chip suggests a Fair-Rite 2743019447 ferrite bead to feed the input at pin 27. The thing is, the missing bead feeds in 9 if I recall correctly, and the datasheet shows this as a direct connection with no bead. Based on this a simple wire should work. If you use a bead the specifics clearly aren't important. I grabbed a random bead/inductor from a dead motherboard and it works fine.
In my early 20's I had a job that gave us yearly profit-sharing bonuses. That year was a good year for the company and I got about $5k. I got myself some very high-end PC parts and this card was one of them.
Like! I wonder how much a 3dfx Voodoo 1 can be overclocked, unfortunately there is almost no information on this subject. It would be very interesting to see some benchmarks with a 8 mb 60 to 65 mhz Voodoo 1 :)
@@bitsundbolts as far as I know the Diamond Monster had an option to run at 57.5 mhz. There were many Voodoo 1 cards sold with 30 - 35 ns EDO ram which at least for the memory have a high overclocking potential.
I would leave the pins like that, it is working and that maters the most! I also attempted repairing broken pins in chips and I found much easier if I just leave the wire straight near the bit of metal of the remaining pin. But I guess does not look as good as your fix.
I've had to do this many times, usually to fix my own screw ups, but there always seems to be enough of the pin sticking out after breaking off that it always works. I'm surprised you were able to fix it this well with such fat wire. You should get a roll of 30 gauge wire wrap wire or a roll of lacquered magnet wire to fix things like this and broken traces and stuff for the future.
Technically, ferrite beads are inductors rated by their impedance at a given frequency (just numbers tho, and it will not affect the performance compared to the one of an inductor with the alike properties of course), this also makes them less expensive due to a lower accuracy requirement. The things to worry about are the saturation current (as above one the AC impedance starts to drop) and the DC resistance (which the beads are expected to have the least of, - of course it means nothing, and you can find an inductor with the same or even lower DC resistance). So, if your inductor's saturation current is high enough, I'd say usually you are good to keep using it, as it likely has a bypass capacitor on the load end anyway, so the value, with 4.7 uH being a higher one, does not really matter that much. If anything, you can just take a scope and make sure the voltage spikes do not propagate through the filter the bead used to be a part of. Also make sure no significant DC voltage drop happens across the inductor, and should both tests pass you are good to keep using it without any worries.
@@bitsundbolts You can get an LCR meter for about 30 bucks these days. It certainly won't be accurate, but it lets you get a rough idea of the capacitance, inductance and series resistance of SMD components. There is *a lot* more to component selection than these values, but combined with knowing the physical dimensions, it reduces the chance of damaging other parts of the circuit by a lot.
a nice tip, but it's difficult to solder. Next time instead of it, just use tranformator copper wire,I think it would be be easier to solder and fit to pins.
Nice repair. I wish I had the skills to repair/diagnose electronics. I wonder what the previous owner did with the card and if they caused all the legs to become disconnected from the PCB.
7:38 as the saying says : "better is the ennemy of good", if it's just for cosmetic look, it doesn't look half bad already so I think you should leave it as is :)
I have to do the same work on 486 motherboard chipset but in my case broken pins are not in the corner but in the middle of a chip and maybe I will also try to fix PII BX chipset in similar way (he don't have pins but I have to try this angle grinder trick).
After watching this I'm glad my original voodoo card and gravis ultrasound didn't pay the price for my poor storage methods of the early 2000s and beyond.
I see - to flatten the round wire, that probably would have helped a little. I may use your suggestion for a Voodoo 2 that may arrive with one pin missing somewhere in the center of the pin-row.
I don't know how to do this. Someone on Vogons suggested a device that apparently can do that, but it's over 60k USD - used. Maybe someone will he able to help some day.
I dont think it matter much if it serves the same purpose. I got my two Diamond Voodoo2 12MBs for a steal at $85.00 apiece. I have a dead one you can have if you want it.
I wouldn't mind having a look at the dead Voodoo card. You can email me using the address found in the about page of the channel (bitsundbolts at gmail dot com)
Personally, I'd be tempted to forget about authentic looks and try to provide extra protection to your replacement pins. Maybe cover the entire corner of the chip in an epoxy blob? Or maybe someone knows about a product that can be easily removed in the future with some kind of solvent? I'm just worried that those solder joins with the lead frame will be far more vulnerable to damage in the future than fully intact pins.
I am sure those pins are not as strong as an intact pin, but they are quite good. I am not worried anything is going to happen to them. One could tape a heatsink over the chip, covering the chips with some overhang - that won't protect the pins entirely, but it will be harder to reach them.
There's no way I could do this many pina like this yet. Bet while I solder the new leg from the bottom, the top also desolders itself and everything tips over. But I can throw bodge wires, hopefully that's ok.
It took me about 10-15 minutes to get those 3 pins attached. I think the thin soldering tip doesn't dump a lot of heat into the pin since I did not face desoldering on the opposite side. Wires and apparently angle grinders are all good :)
@@bitsundbolts I suppose i could just tweeze them in and solder them from one side, then liquid-soldermask that in, and then the other. Where there's a will, there's a way. Magnification is the most important bit to sort out properly.
I don't know much about these components, but based on what they both do it sounds like there is pretty much no difference and if anything an inductor is probably a better component. But I will be happy to say I'm wrong if someone wants to say otherwise.
They are both inductors, but they have very different characteristics. Optimized for different jobs. This is like capacitors. you have many types and ceramic capacitors have different characteristics from electrolytic capacitors.
For this kind of a repair I usually use Kynar wire (not the cheap knockoff stuff). Not only is it thin enough for these pins, the conductor is silver plated lowering it's resistance, and the insulation on the wire wont melt or shrink back when using it as general hookup wire as it's PVDF. Instead of trying to cut and shape the wire, I would have just stripped off the insulation on a length of wire, soldered it to the pad, bent it into place, soldered it to the chip, then cut off the excess. The excess wire not only gives you something to hold and manipulate, but also sinks the heat away from the pad, preventing it from melting the solder on the pad. The ticker wire you used also may fail prematurely due to thermal cycling over time cracking the solder joints at the chip, a thinner wire which can flex would likely not suffer from this. You can also take a scalpel (NOT and angle grinder, sheesh) to the plastic package and scrape it back to expose more of the leads on the lead-frame to solder to, giving a more secure connection.
Do you think you could manage to repair similar corner damage on the FBI chip of a Voodoo2? The pitch is even smaller! I'd be happy to send you my damaged Voodoo2 and you could do a repair video - I'd just like to get it back eventually.
I do have a Voodoo 2 that has a center pin missing somewhere, but that card is still in Germany. I am pretty sure I am able to do it. You can email me using the email found on the channel about page and we can continue the discussion there.
Can you please make a video on upgrading a RTX3060 laptop GPU to 12gb VRAM? I'm Joking but would be nice if you could upgrade it. Sadly as far as I know it's not possible
This gives me hope I’ll someday fix the pins I broke on a chip in a Sharp X68000. I’ll need a better microscope, and some how develop better fine motor skills.
Do you know if mojo also works for voodoo 5 5500 cards? Or maybe another similar testing program for DOS? I'm really struggling with a card like that that has probably RAM issues. Full of vertical lines/garbage on the screen. One version of mojo sais that no voodo card was detected, other one stops with some error message. Thanks.
I have not tested mojo with anything but Voodoo 1 cards. But I think this tool will only work with Voodoo 1 and Voodoo 2 cards. Have you tried pressing on the memory chips to see if it changes the pattern on-screen? Maybe a solder joint that's broken.
The card was probably dropped. Fell on that corner of the chip and bent all the corner pins down. The shock of this broke loose all those other pins because it's very old. Then someone without the skills to do this attempted to bend them back and broke them off. Probably tried to do it without a microscope at hand so that's why all 3 are broken and the 4th is bent way out.
You made things difficult for yourself. A simple 90 degree bend on the wire would have sufficed. It's never going to look original. You could have done a simple bend, soldered the wire in place and then cut it to length. Much simpler. And you would have had something to hold when putting it in place. Maybe less neat, but as I said it will always be a visible repair.
You got scammed. 8Mb V1 is much more expensive, board is crap, soundcards, if you can call them that, are trash, too. Sorry for your loss, given you live in UAE, it probably ain't a thing.
I would not trade a Quantum3D Obsidian 8MB Voodoo card for those items. The card I traded was upgraded by me - which I can and will recreate very soon again. Even if they aren't the best items, they are still going to satisfy some of my curiosity. In UAE it is almost impossible to get retro hardware.
@@bitsundboltsI don't think you got scammed. You traded something you can recreate, for something else you wanted and can use to make videos. That is a perfectly fine deal. Even if they are not the most high end components. (Which I doubt because low end sound cards usually don't have memory slots.) Everyone has done the high end components over and over. And TH-camrs like philscomputerlab make videos about the lower end or less popular components too. They are cheaper to get and are interesting or useful in their own ways. They just require a little more work to get the most out of them.
The 8Mb mod ... I don't understand it....... If you are bridging (or piggybacking) the data address pins of both.. original and additional chips............ well.. the additional chips will have an identical copy of the same data...... the new chips will have in them exactly the same 4Mb of data that the originals...... they do not store additional data............ in other words.. the GPU can not store additional data in the new chips.... because it do not have new additional traces to store or read from them... i think 🤔. -..
There is one pin on the memory that is connected to a different RAS line on the 3dfx chip. Think of it as an activation signal and we have RAS1 for 4 memory chips and RAS2 for the other 4 memory chips. That is why we can reuse all the other lines going to the memory pads.
@@bitsundbolts Right.. but in that case.. it will not be the video card configured for disable or ignore that RAS2??.... like in the BIOS or something 🤔 .... for don't read/write in chips that originally do not have??........ or maybe you modified it...... I should watch the video of the mod again 🥺 .. .. maybe some video card memory test like MemTestCL will show as if the video RAM is actually working... ..... or some other like that because MemTestCL is for OpenGL only i think
It for sure works because I do see a difference in performance as well as the possibility to enable higher resolutions. This only works with more memory.
Very well done! I wouldn't dream of doing such repair, probably would have given up after a few minutes of frustration... By the way, where can I find the MOJO diagnostic tool for DOS? EDIT: never mind, found it. 3dfx Glide2 SDK for DOS/Win32 V2.43 -> unpack gwebvgr3.exe.
I wouldn't be so dismissive of the difficulty of this. It was easy for you because you've developed your abilities to the point that you can successfully perform this repair, but it is certainly not easy. Great job again on resurrecting another precious Voodoo. You're doing God's work! Love your content!
The microscope helps a lot! The repair didn't require any electronics knowledge, but the area is very small. I am glad the repair was a success! Every 3Dfx card saved is worth the effort.
It's 90% equipment and 10% skill, all you really need is some basic experience with soldering and steady hand. without microscope, this repair would be close to impossible unless you have hawk's eyes transplanted.
@@bitsundbolts The 8Mb mod ... I don't understand it....... If you are bridging (or piggybacking) the data address pins of both.. original and additional chips............ well.. the additional chips will have an identical copy of the same data...... the new chips will have in them exactly the same 4Mb of data that the originals...... they do not store additional data............ in other words.. the GPU can not store additional data in the new chips.... because it do not have new additional traces to store or read from them... i think 🤔...
Another repaired 3dfx card, great!
I have been an electronics hobbyist on and off for about 30 years now. But I have almost only worked with through-hole stuff. I could NOT solder what you just did on that card! Awesome job mate, well done repairing that card!
Thank you! Without the microscope, I wouldn't be able to do this type of work. I just need to replace the camera and light to improve the quality. Thanks for watching!
Great repair! Since the card is working, I personally would not replace the pins. I would fear the pads lifting (more) from the PCB or the remaining part of the original pins breaking from the chip.
Yeah, I will leave the card as it is. It is working great so far - the upgrade to 8MB is in progress!
It is so nice to these these cards again. Back in the days I wanted something that rendered in true Open GL, so I skipped the Voodoos. I was using a professional ELSA Gloria XXL with Windows NT 4.0 instead. The card was great for 3D Studio and CAD but not so awesome for games. I was always a bit jealous of the people that could run Quake and Unreal so well 😁 After the ELSA i went straight for a Geforce 256, but it is difficult to forget how important the Voodoos were and how fast Glide was for gaming. You did a great repair there, very neat!
Fanastic job! Regads the pin fixes, I would go with super fine wires rather than replacement legs - the reason is if they get knocked, they could break off further where you then need to grind the chip edge away to fix. Fine wires on those points, perhaps covered by UV solder mask paint would be fine and a lot less likely to get damaged from knocks etc.
It's a pleasure to see fellow 3dfx fans doing the same thing. I recently fixed a Diamond Monster 3D II with one corner pin missing on the FBI. The metal was not long enough so I dug a tiny channel upwards with the tweezers and soldered on a piece of wire. The card came back alive just fine. Save these relics, one at a time!
You gave life to another artifact of the past. This is amazing!
Don't worry about mixing up ferrite beed with inductor. Ferrite beed also belongs to inductors but has more specialised task. It's often used to stop high frequency oscillations passing through to the power line. Unless currents are really high typical SMD inductor can do this job just fine. We all live and learn.
I wouldn't worry about a higher gauge wire, it looks fine from a distance. Either way, it's great that another 3dfx card is working again!
Great microsoldering job! Those lifted pins looked like they suffered some physical damage as some were not even touching the pads. Maybe whoever tried to fix those corner was there to fix those ones too? Anyways very nice to see a card like that saved from the bin!
wow, and here is me giving up on the search for a job, because i have to fill a form whenever i want to apply. such hard work
Great job. Another Voodoo card saved from the trash heap.
That was magnificent soldering work. I am in awe.
Thank you!
Never underestimate the value of patience. Its an important skill many do not have
Handy tip. You can harvest thin enamel wire from old laptop or PC cooling fans. Also you can safely remove a small amount of the encapsulation plastic if the broken stub is too small to solder to.
I may have to remove some of the plastic. When I pressed on the memory boards, the solder joints on the chip broke. It was a quick fix, but clearly the sturdy replacement pins and weak connection to the stubs aren't a good combination. For now, I am very careful with the card, but I may mix it into another video which requires pin replacement and mention the issues with my approach in this video.
That looked really difficult. I wouldn't change the pins for wires, if it's working I wouldn't touch it again.
This reminded me I have a 386 with a missing pin that I have to fix sometime :S
I love the Vogons community.
L10 is the component which was missing on my Diamond Monster 3D card as well. It supplies power from the 5v rail to one of the PLL inside of the ICS5342 GENDAC. The datasheet for this chip suggests a Fair-Rite 2743019447 ferrite bead to feed the input at pin 27. The thing is, the missing bead feeds in 9 if I recall correctly, and the datasheet shows this as a direct connection with no bead. Based on this a simple wire should work. If you use a bead the specifics clearly aren't important. I grabbed a random bead/inductor from a dead motherboard and it works fine.
Impressive as always seeing my 3d brethren resurrected!
In my early 20's I had a job that gave us yearly profit-sharing bonuses. That year was a good year for the company and I got about $5k. I got myself some very high-end PC parts and this card was one of them.
Nice repair, as I wrote to you before, it is not a difficult repair, it just requires patience and a firm hand and a thin soldering attachment 😉
the best 3dfx channel on youtube !
Thank you so much!
Like! I wonder how much a 3dfx Voodoo 1 can be overclocked, unfortunately there is almost no information on this subject. It would be very interesting to see some benchmarks with a 8 mb 60 to 65 mhz Voodoo 1 :)
I read that Voodoo cards are terrible in overclocking. But then, moving to 55 MHz is already a 10% overclock.
@@bitsundbolts as far as I know the Diamond Monster had an option to run at 57.5 mhz. There were many Voodoo 1 cards sold with 30 - 35 ns EDO ram which at least for the memory have a high overclocking potential.
I would leave the pins like that, it is working and that maters the most!
I also attempted repairing broken pins in chips and I found much easier if I just leave the wire straight near the bit of metal of the remaining pin. But I guess does not look as good as your fix.
8:14 I'm assuming what looks like a fracture here will come up later... unless this pin isn't super important.
8:04 how many of you closed your eyes when the UV light was being applied? :)
I've had to do this many times, usually to fix my own screw ups, but there always seems to be enough of the pin sticking out after breaking off that it always works. I'm surprised you were able to fix it this well with such fat wire. You should get a roll of 30 gauge wire wrap wire or a roll of lacquered magnet wire to fix things like this and broken traces and stuff for the future.
Or for really fine stuff take a single strand out of a stranded wire.
I definitely should use thinner wire.
Technically, ferrite beads are inductors rated by their impedance at a given frequency (just numbers tho, and it will not affect the performance compared to the one of an inductor with the alike properties of course), this also makes them less expensive due to a lower accuracy requirement. The things to worry about are the saturation current (as above one the AC impedance starts to drop) and the DC resistance (which the beads are expected to have the least of, - of course it means nothing, and you can find an inductor with the same or even lower DC resistance). So, if your inductor's saturation current is high enough, I'd say usually you are good to keep using it, as it likely has a bypass capacitor on the load end anyway, so the value, with 4.7 uH being a higher one, does not really matter that much. If anything, you can just take a scope and make sure the voltage spikes do not propagate through the filter the bead used to be a part of. Also make sure no significant DC voltage drop happens across the inductor, and should both tests pass you are good to keep using it without any worries.
As an electronics technician: Replacing an inductor / ferrite bead without knowing it's exact characteristics is crazy. But I'm glad it worked.
How could I find out the value of this component without spending thousands of USD on equipment? Is that even possible?
@@bitsundbolts You can get an LCR meter for about 30 bucks these days. It certainly won't be accurate, but it lets you get a rough idea of the capacitance, inductance and series resistance of SMD components. There is *a lot* more to component selection than these values, but combined with knowing the physical dimensions, it reduces the chance of damaging other parts of the circuit by a lot.
@@bitsundbolts I don't think either are absolutely necessary here. We're talking about 50Mhz 3.3V components if at all.
You can ""hammer" a bit to the oversize pin before soldering
Good job, you have robotics hands.
Hehe, I am happy that my hands are quite steady!
Great content and amazing work !
a nice tip, but it's difficult to solder. Next time instead of it, just use tranformator copper wire,I think it would be be easier to solder and fit to pins.
Nice repair. I wish I had the skills to repair/diagnose electronics. I wonder what the previous owner did with the card and if they caused all the legs to become disconnected from the PCB.
you can grind the chip away to exspose where the leg/pin broke away' just bridge with trace repair wire ..
great efforts, thanks for the vid
7:38 as the saying says : "better is the ennemy of good", if it's just for cosmetic look, it doesn't look half bad already so I think you should leave it as is :)
I have to do the same work on 486 motherboard chipset but in my case broken pins are not in the corner but in the middle of a chip and maybe I will also try to fix PII BX chipset in similar way (he don't have pins but I have to try this angle grinder trick).
Congrats, great job.
Thanks!
Nice save!
After watching this I'm glad my original voodoo card and gravis ultrasound didn't pay the price for my poor storage methods of the early 2000s and beyond.
Awesome!
The saying apply: If it ain´t broken don´t fix it, so just keep the thicker pins for now :)
You can use a hammer and flatten the wire slightly for easy soldering
I see - to flatten the round wire, that probably would have helped a little. I may use your suggestion for a Voodoo 2 that may arrive with one pin missing somewhere in the center of the pin-row.
Try to find out the value of the original ferrite bead, they mostly cannot be replaced by a drop in in a design like this...
I don't know how to do this. Someone on Vogons suggested a device that apparently can do that, but it's over 60k USD - used. Maybe someone will he able to help some day.
Should you replace the thicker pins with thinner?
"A bird in the hand is better than 2 in the bush."
I dont think it matter much if it serves the same purpose. I got my two Diamond Voodoo2 12MBs for a steal at $85.00 apiece. I have a dead one you can have if you want it.
I wouldn't mind having a look at the dead Voodoo card. You can email me using the address found in the about page of the channel (bitsundbolts at gmail dot com)
Leave the pins as they are now - they're perfectly fine.
Personally, I'd be tempted to forget about authentic looks and try to provide extra protection to your replacement pins.
Maybe cover the entire corner of the chip in an epoxy blob? Or maybe someone knows about a product that can be easily removed in the future with some kind of solvent?
I'm just worried that those solder joins with the lead frame will be far more vulnerable to damage in the future than fully intact pins.
I am sure those pins are not as strong as an intact pin, but they are quite good. I am not worried anything is going to happen to them. One could tape a heatsink over the chip, covering the chips with some overhang - that won't protect the pins entirely, but it will be harder to reach them.
There's no way I could do this many pina like this yet. Bet while I solder the new leg from the bottom, the top also desolders itself and everything tips over.
But I can throw bodge wires, hopefully that's ok.
It took me about 10-15 minutes to get those 3 pins attached. I think the thin soldering tip doesn't dump a lot of heat into the pin since I did not face desoldering on the opposite side. Wires and apparently angle grinders are all good :)
@@bitsundbolts I suppose i could just tweeze them in and solder them from one side, then liquid-soldermask that in, and then the other. Where there's a will, there's a way. Magnification is the most important bit to sort out properly.
I don't know much about these components, but based on what they both do it sounds like there is pretty much no difference and if anything an inductor is probably a better component. But I will be happy to say I'm wrong if someone wants to say otherwise.
They are both inductors, but they have very different characteristics. Optimized for different jobs.
This is like capacitors. you have many types and ceramic capacitors have different characteristics from electrolytic capacitors.
For this kind of a repair I usually use Kynar wire (not the cheap knockoff stuff). Not only is it thin enough for these pins, the conductor is silver plated lowering it's resistance, and the insulation on the wire wont melt or shrink back when using it as general hookup wire as it's PVDF. Instead of trying to cut and shape the wire, I would have just stripped off the insulation on a length of wire, soldered it to the pad, bent it into place, soldered it to the chip, then cut off the excess. The excess wire not only gives you something to hold and manipulate, but also sinks the heat away from the pad, preventing it from melting the solder on the pad.
The ticker wire you used also may fail prematurely due to thermal cycling over time cracking the solder joints at the chip, a thinner wire which can flex would likely not suffer from this. You can also take a scalpel (NOT and angle grinder, sheesh) to the plastic package and scrape it back to expose more of the leads on the lead-frame to solder to, giving a more secure connection.
Next awesome video. Thanks for good friday morning.
Good morning!
Do you think you could manage to repair similar corner damage on the FBI chip of a Voodoo2? The pitch is even smaller! I'd be happy to send you my damaged Voodoo2 and you could do a repair video - I'd just like to get it back eventually.
I do have a Voodoo 2 that has a center pin missing somewhere, but that card is still in Germany. I am pretty sure I am able to do it. You can email me using the email found on the channel about page and we can continue the discussion there.
Can you please make a video on upgrading a RTX3060 laptop GPU to 12gb VRAM?
I'm Joking but would be nice if you could upgrade it. Sadly as far as I know it's not possible
3dfx Cards Forever!
This gives me hope I’ll someday fix the pins I broke on a chip in a Sharp X68000. I’ll need a better microscope, and some how develop better fine motor skills.
Do you know if mojo also works for voodoo 5 5500 cards? Or maybe another similar testing program for DOS?
I'm really struggling with a card like that that has probably RAM issues. Full of vertical lines/garbage on the screen. One version of mojo sais that no voodo card was detected, other one stops with some error message.
Thanks.
I have not tested mojo with anything but Voodoo 1 cards. But I think this tool will only work with Voodoo 1 and Voodoo 2 cards.
Have you tried pressing on the memory chips to see if it changes the pattern on-screen? Maybe a solder joint that's broken.
i saw orchid 🎉yessssss
Would those be able to be modded to support SLI?
Never go back and try and fix a working repair like this.
You could harvest replacement pins from some noname/garbage chip.
True! Until now I don't have any chip with small pins like those that I could use.
Ah those were the days when we were happy with 20 FPS
nah as long as they aren't shorting, leave it alone. Nothing wrong with slightly thicker pins.
Yeah, I'll leave it as is. Not worth the trouble. It works, that is what counts.
Top tip: Get some enamel wire aka magnet wire.
The card was probably dropped. Fell on that corner of the chip and bent all the corner pins down. The shock of this broke loose all those other pins because it's very old. Then someone without the skills to do this attempted to bend them back and broke them off. Probably tried to do it without a microscope at hand so that's why all 3 are broken and the 4th is bent way out.
Very nice and plausible investigative work!
Nah, just leave it as it is since it works.
Yeah, I think I will keep it like that
epic
Definitely get smaller pins
I don't see 3dfx any better than a geforce 2 mx
frame very low
just cut pins from another no value similar chip and solder them as you done
bump
You made things difficult for yourself. A simple 90 degree bend on the wire would have sufficed. It's never going to look original. You could have done a simple bend, soldered the wire in place and then cut it to length. Much simpler. And you would have had something to hold when putting it in place. Maybe less neat, but as I said it will always be a visible repair.
You got scammed.
8Mb V1 is much more expensive, board is crap, soundcards, if you can call them that, are trash, too.
Sorry for your loss, given you live in UAE, it probably ain't a thing.
I would not trade a Quantum3D Obsidian 8MB Voodoo card for those items. The card I traded was upgraded by me - which I can and will recreate very soon again. Even if they aren't the best items, they are still going to satisfy some of my curiosity.
In UAE it is almost impossible to get retro hardware.
@@bitsundbolts Fine.
@@bitsundboltsI don't think you got scammed. You traded something you can recreate, for something else you wanted and can use to make videos. That is a perfectly fine deal.
Even if they are not the most high end components. (Which I doubt because low end sound cards usually don't have memory slots.)
Everyone has done the high end components over and over. And TH-camrs like philscomputerlab make videos about the lower end or less popular components too. They are cheaper to get and are interesting or useful in their own ways. They just require a little more work to get the most out of them.
china blob
The 8Mb mod ... I don't understand it....... If you are bridging (or piggybacking) the data address pins of both.. original and additional chips............ well.. the additional chips will have an identical copy of the same data...... the new chips will have in them exactly the same 4Mb of data that the originals...... they do not store additional data............ in other words.. the GPU can not store additional data in the new chips.... because it do not have new additional traces to store or read from them... i think 🤔. -..
There is one pin on the memory that is connected to a different RAS line on the 3dfx chip. Think of it as an activation signal and we have RAS1 for 4 memory chips and RAS2 for the other 4 memory chips. That is why we can reuse all the other lines going to the memory pads.
@@bitsundbolts Right.. but in that case.. it will not be the video card configured for disable or ignore that RAS2??.... like in the BIOS or something 🤔 .... for don't read/write in chips that originally do not have??........ or maybe you modified it...... I should watch the video of the mod again 🥺 .. .. maybe some video card memory test like MemTestCL will show as if the video RAM is actually working... ..... or some other like that because MemTestCL is for OpenGL only i think
It for sure works because I do see a difference in performance as well as the possibility to enable higher resolutions. This only works with more memory.
Very well done! I wouldn't dream of doing such repair, probably would have given up after a few minutes of frustration...
By the way, where can I find the MOJO diagnostic tool for DOS? EDIT: never mind, found it. 3dfx Glide2 SDK for DOS/Win32 V2.43 -> unpack gwebvgr3.exe.
I added the link to the Mojo tool in the video description as well.