What I liked about Voodoo 3 2000s back in the day is they supported standard VESA graphics as their legacy mode. So it required no special drivers or software to get them to work in high-res 2d on Linux in the bad old days of XFree86.
Flash / eeprom / eprom etc all rely on modifying a charge in a cell to signify 0 or a 1. The process of sensing and stabilising the read bit takes longer the weaker it is (until it can no longer be read as its correct state at all) so it was likely no more than a marginal bit that needed some extra time. Another quirk of arrayed storage devices like these is that they can often read data muuuch faster than their spec if you read them linearly compared to jumping around as it would while executing code from said device :)
Like! Another card brought back to life. A while ago I purchased a Voodoo Powercolor Evilking 3 Extreme with 183 mhz and 5ns (200 mhz) memory. Theoretically with 5ns (200 mhz) memory it should have easily reached 200 or even 210 mhz. But to my surprise it was stable with no artifact at only 183 mhz, even 1 mhz more and small artefacts would appear. Than I noticed that the card had 1 capacitor missing. I guess that it wasn’t stable at over 183 mhz because of that missing capacitor.
Just make sure you have a fan, even if you don't overclock the card. STB specced horribly undersized heatsinks for all Voodoo3 cards. It's not uncommon for them to suffer thermal death. I've seen those heatsinks get so hot that they burn the anodization off of the heatsink and melt cables touching them.
Most V3 2000 cards with 7ns (143 mhz) memory reach a maximum 160-170 mhz. Many are not stable at 166 mhz because of the slower 7ns (143 mhz) memory. Its just a matter of luck if a 7ns V3 2000 will reach 166 mhz without artefacts. The ones with 6ns (183 mhz) do have a much higher overcloking potential.
Yeah, throw a nice fan on. There aren't any new Voodoo cards produced, so keeping the old one alive is recommended. There are slim 70mm fans, which should give it enough airflow without being too noisy or getting in the way of the slot underneath.
The datasheet says that AT49BV512 has a programming lockout feature. This lockout can be detected by the BIOS itself. Maybe the bit holding the lockout value has forgotten its state?
Also, I think that bytes at address 0xDx may be a card serial number, and so they may mismatch between original and downloaded BIOSes because they were dumped from different cards (but the original card serial may be corrupted too).
Excellent Video, My Exp with Video Cards over the years is to reseat the card into the PCI or AGP Slot which are very tiny and delicate with AGP. Try that first before anything else. Even dust can affect it believe it or not. Seen some dirty cards over the years. Use an Air shop Hose and blow out it clean. Electrical Spray for the Motherboard and dry with a hair dryer on the cold setting. Caps are crap these days, so any one of those could be bad in rare cases. handling is another factor. Even to the day, I see people without rubber gloves and their fingerprints cause corrosion on either the connectors or the board.
🤔Perhaps the flash programming tool uses a slower and more reliable reading speed/method than the the motherboard chipset and was able to recover an intact BIOS. If the checksum is correct (in HxD use Analysis->Checksums, the 8-bit one must be 00) it's probably just a different BIOS version, it would be quite a coincidence that all the values would change randomly keeping the checksum correct.
Looking at the heatsink it appears that a fan was screwed onto it at some point, as you can see at the corners there is missing color where the threads would have bitten the heatsink. That is very strange as I don't see anywhere for power to be sourced on the card for the fan. I suspect that the heatsink is not standard.
I was thinking the same. Looks like it might have been a heatsink meant to cool a chipset that may have had a small 40mm fan on it. If that's the case those fans were notorious for failing back in the Pentium 4 / Athlon XP days. In general the Voodoo 3 2000 GPU didn't need active cooling so the heatsink may have been salvaged for that purpose.
Guess a previous owner did some modding on the card. A different cooler with a fan powered either from the PSU or motherboard. Been there, done that. My Geforce 3 Ti 200, Geforce 7300 GT and Voodoo 3 3000 had that done at some point. On the Geforce 3 I even went so far to solder in a new fan header. Or rather two pieces of wire with the right thickness. It's a passive card, but the solder points are still there.
I wonder if the original bios was on the verge of failing and wasn't being read properly by the card. Maybe the voltage being supplied to the chip was slightly lower than the programmer as well. If the programmer reading the bios had a slightly higher voltage when reading the chip it may have resulted in a successful read of the bios rom. Reflashing the bios could have removed any slight degradation of the rom that caused the card to fail to read it making it work again. I'm no expert and this is only a theory as I have heard that flashing a chip multiple times with the blank check turned off can reduce any chance of the flash failing.
I have a Voodoo 3 3000 that displays weird stripes once it get's warm. Probably just some cold solder joints somewhere, but since the cards aren't produced anymore, every dying one is a card that won't be replaced.
If the stripes are vertical, this speaks for a memory problem. Changing the chips does take some soldering skills, but I managed to fix my V3 2000 AGP like that.
@@moritzrudolf5370 is there a way to figure out which chip has gone bad without just going through all of them? And yes, they are vertical. About 1/4 or so of the width.
Unfortunately, I am not aware of a method to find a faulty memory chip on a graphics card. I did some research once and got some tools that claim to be able to find a faulty chip, but it was for S3 virge ( don't remember the tool right now). I'm planning to look into this once I get a card with memory issues.
@@HappyBeezerStudios an IR camera can help identifying bad chips in general but I don't know if that applies to memory chips too. Also, you don't tend to have one just laying around
I have heard things like bit rot will cause strange issues like this and reflashing the bios will "refresh" it and bring it back to life. I once had a DFI LanParty board that suffered from this and a reflash using the same bios did the trick.
@MrTGuru Maybe the chip just had some "weak" cells. Reading out the bios probably worked more aggressively and managed to get a functional image, and reflashing it put that "fixed" bios back on.
I really enjoy your style of videos, and thought the reveal of the card booting was fantastic. Please keep up this great work, this is high quality content!
Thank you for noticing and mentioning that you like the working card reveal. This is one of my favorite clips I have create so far in my videos. I'll try my best to create even better content in the future! Thanks for watching my videos.
I flashed my Voodoo 3 2000 to 3000 back in the days, the timing of the memories allowed it and It cost me a simple precautionary fan on the otherwise passive heatsink (the one on the card in this video too has the marks of having had a fan at one time). Did it work? Yes. Did I have problems? No. Was there any noticeable performance boost? No. If you want to do it, be my guest, but in my experience it's only wasted time.
I've seen this happen with various components; no boot, or no work condition, flash even the same BIOS as was already on there, and boom, it'll work just fine. Never tried flashing the old BIOS back to it, but I would expect it would work too.
8:20 - it seems that flipped bits were placed in non-critical headers section, but after all corruptions the BIOS checksum have not matched the BIOS itself and so the GPU just failed this check and refused to boot, and re-flashing fixed the checksum and the GPU have verified the checksum correctly and booted up. Or, maybe, flash cells became unreliable and failed to read correctly at full speed, but flash utility may work at lower clock speed to access BIOS chip, and it works (more or less) reliably, and after re-flashihg charges in BIOS flash were updated, and it became working again. I had something like this on SSD which was placed in my laptop - I have need to move partition with cold data to another location temporarily, and first movement took a lot of time, but then I have need to move this partition back to original position, and move process took a WAY less time to complete. I think flash chips were not re-written for a long time at cold data blocks, and some cells lost their charge, and so the SSD controller had to perform many error corrections using ECC codes, but after partition move cells were recharged to full charge, and no ECC were needed to read them when I did second movement.
I was going to say this. I think the most likely explanation is the second one (I doubt the card would perform a checksum of the bios data). I think the only likely explanation is that the flash memory is "too weak" and when read at full speed it just gives non-sensical data, but if read at lower speed (which the flashing utility probably does), then it's possible that it can read the correct value, given enough time. But when he re-flashed the BIOS, the data became more "strongly" written and now works at full speed, even with those missing bits.
@@ToTheGAMESI have serious doubt that those replace all capacitors advocate even have an ESR meter to measure if the electrolytic capacitor are off tolerance. I do lot of electronic repairs and unless your capacitors have blown or are bulging there is no way you can tell if it is good or bad just by looking at it. My ESR meter has been a very handy tool that had saved me lot of time and money from an useless full cap replacement. Though I must admit that those SMD caps from that era are simply garbage and were put in high stress environment, which is almost certainly garanteed they are dead by now.
@@ToTheGAMESno it's not hurr durr, it's called preventative maintenance. All capacitors will leak at some point. You gonna just change one and then put it in a drawer for a few years where the other caps slowly kill the card? Or sell the card, it ends up in the hands of someone who doesn't understand electronics and it ends up dying one day. Caps have a shelf life, even if you don't use them they go bad in time. If you replace with organic polymer they'll last a lot longer.
Great video! VBIOS issues like this seem to be very common in cards from this era. I’ve revived a couple V3 3000s and some Matrox G200 series cards this way. I’m actually working on an AGP Voodoo 3 2000 right now that absolutely refuses to be flashed. I will likely need to desolder the eeprom chip and flash it in an external programmer like you did with the GF2 recently. Wish me luck! 😅 Interesting that the bad ROM worked again when flashed back. I’ve had this same behaviour happen with a bad motherboard BIOS that I pulled off too. I’m assuming there must be some borderline bits that are difficult to read from the chip that get reapplied properly after the flashing process. But yeah I wouldn’t have trusted it either 😁
Thanks! Good luck with your Voodoo 3! Yeah, the GF2 also refused to flash. The BIOS chip I removed from the card doesn't even want to cooperate with my external programmer. Ich cannot write nor read to it - and I get a similar error that I got in DOS. I assume there's something else that's causing issues. Probably requires more time to figure out what's wrong.
@@bitsundbolts Thanks! I ended up replacing the EEPROM on it, but that wasn't the issue. In the end it was a damaged trace leading to the "Output Enable" pin of the EEPROM. Was hard to spot, but the card works perfectly now. Will hopefully get a video out on it in the next few days 👍
i've got an fx5200 that needs a new bios chip. except i can't find one thats properly compatible. tiny little spi chip. this seems to be a thing in a lot of older cards. bit rot or dead bios chips. though some of the cards from around the fx time are going to fail if they get too hot due to the way nvidia made the actual gpu chips. but yeah, reflash/rebios and caps should fix most older gpus.
I recently hooked up my old daily Northwood Pentium 4 tower that has an FX5200 in it and it still works great, hadn't POSTED it in 8 years. I remember when I upgraded to that FX5200 from a MX440 I could watch youtube videos in 480p instead of 360p in 2009.
As far as I am aware, just the BIOS is different. It could be that the memory chips are rated for lower frequencies only on the Voodoo 3 2000, but the PCB should be the same as a Voodoo 3 3000. The graphic chip may be binned at a better quality for the 3000 model.
That's because the second half of the downloaded ROM doesn't actually contain any code, it's just padded with 0xFFs to match the size of the flash chip.
Overclocking to 3 3000 is not as interesting as an attempt to add missing parts such as secondary VGA connector. Will it support multi-monitor configuration?
Bitrot Over time the cmos can lose bits or rather the strength of the bits goes low. Reflashing the same bios brings all the ones and zeros back to 100% strength.
While flash based ROMs will develop errors over time, the main problem with old video cards are the electrolytic capacitors. They only last a decade or so and need to be replaced.
I had similar problem with the bios on my PC main board. After 5 years my PC couldn't boot every time .. once on 3 -4 time and start was very long around 30 seconds. Itt looked like my bios was hardly to read by main board. But after reflashing the bios the main board started to work again like a new ;) ... boot every time and staring in 2 -3 seconds. I think some bios chip degrade over a time and need to be reflashed.
26 year ago i re flashed quite some voodoos and other vga was kind common on some cards with psu blow ups or poor cheap psu back then corrupting them sometimes
I remember Black and white back in high school, very good game. Unfortunately I had bought a S3 Savage card because it was cheap and I was just getting into computers and did not know much. I had to turn the settings down in Black and White but was happy I could play Counter-Strike.
Bioses going bad has me wondering if this is an indication of the lifespan we can expect from Flash chips. 20 years aint bad but magnetic media lasts longer. SSDs are not going to be good for long term storage.
Since you've never extracted the upper 32k area of the flash memory you also couldn't compare it to that of the downloaded file. NOR flash bits can only be reset after a chip erase set them. Maybe bits in the upper 32k have been reset over time and that caused the issue because the firmware is looking for something there. A chip erase command during the programming will set all bits in the NOR flash to 1 again, which would explain why everything works again after flashing back the old lower 32k content.
Interesting! Yes, you are right. The flashing tool never extracted the remaining 32k. If there was something that caused the problem, it was lost the time the chip was erased. Since I did not remove the BIOS chip from the card to use a programmer, the upper 32k were not saved.
I couldn't help but to notice that is a pci version of voodoo card not the agp version I'm pretty sure it's limited by the pci interface as it is. But still be interesting to see if oc will get a reasonable performance boost.
I've seen newer components that replace older voltage regulators for ZX Spectrum and some other consoles, they're much more efficient and release much less heat. Maybe that could also be an option for the Voodoo cards?
I also had a similar problem with an nvidia fx 5200. I removed it after it wouldn't show any output and replaced it with a matrox card and when I put the nvidia one back in years later, it suddenly worked
As far as I was told, the card stopped working in 2006. Similar to the GeForce 2MX I had at that time, I imagine that the PC wouldn't show a picture from time to time until reset. It gets worse until it stops completely.
it's possible it just was corrupted somehow. But that might indicate it's starting to fail. I'm willing to bet this card will stop working and not start back up one day.
So what if you get a card that has a missing BIOS chip altogether? 😅 On my "restoration" project pile is a Voodoo3 PCI card that doesn't seem to have ever had a BIOS soldered on the board. (just empty pads where a BIOS would would be) Until I saw Tech Tanglent's video about the Hydro Thunder PCs using "special" 3Dfx cards that contained their initialization routines in a different ROM on the motherboard, I thought I was dealing with a weird factory issue where somebody messed up. (When the BIOS is completely missing, the card shows up in Windows Device Mangler but not with any identifying titles.)
This is new to me as well. I probably would blame the factory as well. If the PCB of the card is the same as the reference board, I would try to add a bios chip and see what happens. If you're lucky, the flashing tool may just donuts job. But just to be safe, I probably would preflash the chip with the correct BIOS.
@@bitsundbolts I originally suspended my project until I could practice more SMD soldering before adding a BIOS chip. Thankfully I was able to source a chip and socket. Sadly, I'm not sure if the socket will fit in the spot without interfering with nearby passive components so I might just have to go for broke and solder the chip directly. I did, however, preflash the chip when it arrived to make sure that, at least, was functional. Your video is an inspiration for me to finish that project up, especially now that I've at least some practice and new tools I didn't originally have when I received the 3dfx cards. Cheers!
I wish you best of luck! You're right, there are plenty of other small SMD components around the BIOS chip pads. But even if you solder the chip directly, it's worth a shot.
The song should be linked below the video as part of the video description. The song is called "Kurt" from artist Cheel. Probably a tribute to Kurt Cobain, singer, song-writer and guitarist of the band Nirvana.
I need to do this to mine I think. It works intermittently- either that or my CPU overclock is borked. :/ The card is completely stable in game but sometimes my board beeps with Bad Video Card- which is obviously false, since after a few reboots it starts perfectly. This did only start to happen when I added some unsupported RAM though.. some weirdness going on with my RAM, I have two 128MB sticks and a 64MB stick, when only the 128mb sticks are installed it detects 128MB when the 64mb stick is installed in the last slot it bumps the total to 256.. idk what's going on with this machine lmfao
The issue with the card is very similar to what I have experienced with my Geforce2 MX. At some point, it stopped completely - and the reason seems to be the BIOS chip slowly losing data integrity. A reflash of the BIOS chip should help.
@@bitsundbolts I replaced a memory module and it stopped doing it. I’m still going to flash most likely- my card is stable at 3000 speeds so no reason I shouldn’t flash 3000 bios. My case has a side fan blowing air directly over the card it’s perfect
Right, it could be related to other hardware in your system. I would try to run everything at stock speed and see if the bad video card error disappears. Then you can reinstate the overclock one by one testing each over a few days to make sure it's stable. It's a tedious process
What I liked about Voodoo 3 2000s back in the day is they supported standard VESA graphics as their legacy mode. So it required no special drivers or software to get them to work in high-res 2d on Linux in the bad old days of XFree86.
Flash / eeprom / eprom etc all rely on modifying a charge in a cell to signify 0 or a 1.
The process of sensing and stabilising the read bit takes longer the weaker it is (until it can no longer be read as its correct state at all) so it was likely no more than a marginal bit that needed some extra time.
Another quirk of arrayed storage devices like these is that they can often read data muuuch faster than their spec if you read them linearly compared to jumping around as it would while executing code from said device :)
Like! Another card brought back to life. A while ago I purchased a Voodoo Powercolor Evilking 3 Extreme with 183 mhz and 5ns (200 mhz) memory. Theoretically with 5ns (200 mhz) memory it should have easily reached 200 or even 210 mhz. But to my surprise it was stable with no artifact at only 183 mhz, even 1 mhz more and small artefacts would appear. Than I noticed that the card had 1 capacitor missing. I guess that it wasn’t stable at over 183 mhz because of that missing capacitor.
Reminds me of my Radeon 9600 Pro, that also craps out once the memory is just 1 MHz higher.
@@HappyBeezerStudios my radeon 9600 pro overclocked like a beast.
Definitely make it a 3000, as far as I remember it was essentially a 'free' upgrade for all 2000 cards.
Just make sure you have a fan, even if you don't overclock the card. STB specced horribly undersized heatsinks for all Voodoo3 cards. It's not uncommon for them to suffer thermal death.
I've seen those heatsinks get so hot that they burn the anodization off of the heatsink and melt cables touching them.
Bare minimum to keep the card alive past the warranty period...
also as this particual model has 6ns memory will force only thegpu chip to 166 mhz
Most V3 2000 cards with 7ns (143 mhz) memory reach a maximum 160-170 mhz. Many are not stable at 166 mhz because of the slower 7ns (143 mhz) memory. Its just a matter of luck if a 7ns V3 2000 will reach 166 mhz without artefacts. The ones with 6ns (183 mhz) do have a much higher overcloking potential.
Yeah, throw a nice fan on. There aren't any new Voodoo cards produced, so keeping the old one alive is recommended. There are slim 70mm fans, which should give it enough airflow without being too noisy or getting in the way of the slot underneath.
The datasheet says that AT49BV512 has a programming lockout feature. This lockout can be detected by the BIOS itself. Maybe the bit holding the lockout value has forgotten its state?
Also, I think that bytes at address 0xDx may be a card serial number, and so they may mismatch between original and downloaded BIOSes because they were dumped from different cards (but the original card serial may be corrupted too).
Excellent Video, My Exp with Video Cards over the years is to reseat the card into the PCI or AGP Slot which are very tiny and delicate with AGP. Try that first before anything else. Even dust can affect it believe it or not. Seen some dirty cards over the years. Use an Air shop Hose and blow out it clean. Electrical Spray for the Motherboard and dry with a hair dryer on the cold setting. Caps are crap these days, so any one of those could be bad in rare cases. handling is another factor. Even to the day, I see people without rubber gloves and their fingerprints cause corrosion on either the connectors or the board.
🤔Perhaps the flash programming tool uses a slower and more reliable reading speed/method than the the motherboard chipset and was able to recover an intact BIOS.
If the checksum is correct (in HxD use Analysis->Checksums, the 8-bit one must be 00) it's probably just a different BIOS version, it would be quite a coincidence that all the values would change randomly keeping the checksum correct.
Overclocked my Voodoo3 2000 from 143 to 166MHz without problems back then. Very common tweak back then.
Looking at the heatsink it appears that a fan was screwed onto it at some point, as you can see at the corners there is missing color where the threads would have bitten the heatsink. That is very strange as I don't see anywhere for power to be sourced on the card for the fan. I suspect that the heatsink is not standard.
I was thinking the same. Looks like it might have been a heatsink meant to cool a chipset that may have had a small 40mm fan on it. If that's the case those fans were notorious for failing back in the Pentium 4 / Athlon XP days. In general the Voodoo 3 2000 GPU didn't need active cooling so the heatsink may have been salvaged for that purpose.
Guess a previous owner did some modding on the card. A different cooler with a fan powered either from the PSU or motherboard. Been there, done that. My Geforce 3 Ti 200, Geforce 7300 GT and Voodoo 3 3000 had that done at some point.
On the Geforce 3 I even went so far to solder in a new fan header. Or rather two pieces of wire with the right thickness. It's a passive card, but the solder points are still there.
The Voodoo 3 2000 (AGP) card I have doesn't have a fan either. I agree that it may not have had a fan originally.
Flash memory cells will discharge over time. Some long life products have code to read the flash and rewrite it every 10 years or so.
I wonder if the original bios was on the verge of failing and wasn't being read properly by the card. Maybe the voltage being supplied to the chip was slightly lower than the programmer as well.
If the programmer reading the bios had a slightly higher voltage when reading the chip it may have resulted in a successful read of the bios rom.
Reflashing the bios could have removed any slight degradation of the rom that caused the card to fail to read it making it work again.
I'm no expert and this is only a theory as I have heard that flashing a chip multiple times with the blank check turned off can reduce any chance of the flash failing.
I have to admire this level of effort put into restoring a 25 year old video card
I have a Voodoo 3 3000 that displays weird stripes once it get's warm. Probably just some cold solder joints somewhere, but since the cards aren't produced anymore, every dying one is a card that won't be replaced.
If the stripes are vertical, this speaks for a memory problem. Changing the chips does take some soldering skills, but I managed to fix my V3 2000 AGP like that.
@@moritzrudolf5370 is there a way to figure out which chip has gone bad without just going through all of them?
And yes, they are vertical. About 1/4 or so of the width.
Unfortunately, I am not aware of a method to find a faulty memory chip on a graphics card. I did some research once and got some tools that claim to be able to find a faulty chip, but it was for S3 virge ( don't remember the tool right now). I'm planning to look into this once I get a card with memory issues.
@@HappyBeezerStudios an IR camera can help identifying bad chips in general but I don't know if that applies to memory chips too. Also, you don't tend to have one just laying around
I have heard things like bit rot will cause strange issues like this and reflashing the bios will "refresh" it and bring it back to life. I once had a DFI LanParty board that suffered from this and a reflash using the same bios did the trick.
yup classic case of bit rot
@MrTGuru Maybe the chip just had some "weak" cells. Reading out the bios probably worked more aggressively and managed to get a functional image, and reflashing it put that "fixed" bios back on.
@MrTGuru a ghost in the machine i guess
The self-bricking voodoos kinda reminds me of the self-bricking Wii Us. Except like 15 years apart.
I really enjoy your style of videos, and thought the reveal of the card booting was fantastic. Please keep up this great work, this is high quality content!
Thank you for noticing and mentioning that you like the working card reveal. This is one of my favorite clips I have create so far in my videos.
I'll try my best to create even better content in the future! Thanks for watching my videos.
Great video so far, one comment: you should screw the regulator the other way around, with the screw comming from back and nut on the regulator side
Curious why. I followed the other Voodoo 3 card where the screw was like this too. Is there any benefit reversing the orientation?
@@bitsundbolts back in the day, most if not all cards were "flat" on the underside. I guess it was a way to prevent any possible shortcircuits
I flashed my Voodoo 3 2000 to 3000 back in the days, the timing of the memories allowed it and It cost me a simple precautionary fan on the otherwise passive heatsink (the one on the card in this video too has the marks of having had a fan at one time).
Did it work? Yes. Did I have problems? No. Was there any noticeable performance boost? No.
If you want to do it, be my guest, but in my experience it's only wasted time.
I've seen this happen with various components; no boot, or no work condition, flash even the same BIOS as was already on there, and boom, it'll work just fine. Never tried flashing the old BIOS back to it, but I would expect it would work too.
8:20 - it seems that flipped bits were placed in non-critical headers section, but after all corruptions the BIOS checksum have not matched the BIOS itself and so the GPU just failed this check and refused to boot, and re-flashing fixed the checksum and the GPU have verified the checksum correctly and booted up.
Or, maybe, flash cells became unreliable and failed to read correctly at full speed, but flash utility may work at lower clock speed to access BIOS chip, and it works (more or less) reliably, and after re-flashihg charges in BIOS flash were updated, and it became working again.
I had something like this on SSD which was placed in my laptop - I have need to move partition with cold data to another location temporarily, and first movement took a lot of time, but then I have need to move this partition back to original position, and move process took a WAY less time to complete. I think flash chips were not re-written for a long time at cold data blocks, and some cells lost their charge, and so the SSD controller had to perform many error corrections using ECC codes, but after partition move cells were recharged to full charge, and no ECC were needed to read them when I did second movement.
does the tool updates the checksum on the fly?
@@cocusar I don't know. Maybe re-reading BIOS after flashing BROKEN.ROM will uncover this.
I was going to say this. I think the most likely explanation is the second one (I doubt the card would perform a checksum of the bios data). I think the only likely explanation is that the flash memory is "too weak" and when read at full speed it just gives non-sensical data, but if read at lower speed (which the flashing utility probably does), then it's possible that it can read the correct value, given enough time. But when he re-flashed the BIOS, the data became more "strongly" written and now works at full speed, even with those missing bits.
Probably best to replace all of those electrolytic capacitors since you're already working on one
Why would you, if they checked good? Thats just "hurr durr replace now" mentality.
@@ToTheGAMESI have serious doubt that those replace all capacitors advocate even have an ESR meter to measure if the electrolytic capacitor are off tolerance. I do lot of electronic repairs and unless your capacitors have blown or are bulging there is no way you can tell if it is good or bad just by looking at it. My ESR meter has been a very handy tool that had saved me lot of time and money from an useless full cap replacement. Though I must admit that those SMD caps from that era are simply garbage and were put in high stress environment, which is almost certainly garanteed they are dead by now.
@@ToTheGAMESno it's not hurr durr, it's called preventative maintenance. All capacitors will leak at some point. You gonna just change one and then put it in a drawer for a few years where the other caps slowly kill the card? Or sell the card, it ends up in the hands of someone who doesn't understand electronics and it ends up dying one day. Caps have a shelf life, even if you don't use them they go bad in time. If you replace with organic polymer they'll last a lot longer.
Best new nerdy channel I've found
Great video! VBIOS issues like this seem to be very common in cards from this era. I’ve revived a couple V3 3000s and some Matrox G200 series cards this way. I’m actually working on an AGP Voodoo 3 2000 right now that absolutely refuses to be flashed. I will likely need to desolder the eeprom chip and flash it in an external programmer like you did with the GF2 recently. Wish me luck! 😅
Interesting that the bad ROM worked again when flashed back. I’ve had this same behaviour happen with a bad motherboard BIOS that I pulled off too. I’m assuming there must be some borderline bits that are difficult to read from the chip that get reapplied properly after the flashing process. But yeah I wouldn’t have trusted it either 😁
Thanks! Good luck with your Voodoo 3! Yeah, the GF2 also refused to flash. The BIOS chip I removed from the card doesn't even want to cooperate with my external programmer. Ich cannot write nor read to it - and I get a similar error that I got in DOS. I assume there's something else that's causing issues.
Probably requires more time to figure out what's wrong.
@@bitsundbolts Thanks! I ended up replacing the EEPROM on it, but that wasn't the issue. In the end it was a damaged trace leading to the "Output Enable" pin of the EEPROM. Was hard to spot, but the card works perfectly now. Will hopefully get a video out on it in the next few days 👍
Can't wait to see it!
When I saw "I see nothing!" in the thumbnail, I immediately thought of Sgt. Schultz haha!
i've got an fx5200 that needs a new bios chip. except i can't find one thats properly compatible. tiny little spi chip.
this seems to be a thing in a lot of older cards. bit rot or dead bios chips. though some of the cards from around the fx time are going to fail if they get too hot due to the way nvidia made the actual gpu chips.
but yeah, reflash/rebios and caps should fix most older gpus.
I recently hooked up my old daily Northwood Pentium 4 tower that has an FX5200 in it and it still works great, hadn't POSTED it in 8 years. I remember when I upgraded to that FX5200 from a MX440 I could watch youtube videos in 480p instead of 360p in 2009.
Another great repair. I would like to know the physical differences between a 2000 and a 3000. Is it just the bios?
As far as I am aware, just the BIOS is different. It could be that the memory chips are rated for lower frequencies only on the Voodoo 3 2000, but the PCB should be the same as a Voodoo 3 3000. The graphic chip may be binned at a better quality for the 3000 model.
Did you notice the "new" ROM images were 64K and the one on the chip was only 32K?
That's because the second half of the downloaded ROM doesn't actually contain any code, it's just padded with 0xFFs to match the size of the flash chip.
Overclocking to 3 3000 is not as interesting as an attempt to add missing parts such as secondary VGA connector. Will it support multi-monitor configuration?
There is something hilarious about the phrase blinking crazy screen in that magnificent accent!
i love your accent, i dont even like old pieces of tech that much, i prefer the crazy flashing bios btw.
Bitrot
Over time the cmos can lose bits or rather the strength of the bits goes low. Reflashing the same bios brings all the ones and zeros back to 100% strength.
While flash based ROMs will develop errors over time, the main problem with old video cards are the electrolytic capacitors. They only last a decade or so and need to be replaced.
Its a clock pointer issue, akin to a Y2K bug. Planned obsolescence. Your bios reset fixed your broken clock pointer.
I had similar problem with the bios on my PC main board. After 5 years my PC couldn't boot every time .. once on 3 -4 time and start was very long around 30 seconds.
Itt looked like my bios was hardly to read by main board.
But after reflashing the bios the main board started to work again like a new ;) ... boot every time and staring in 2 -3 seconds.
I think some bios chip degrade over a time and need to be reflashed.
I dont own a 3dfx card but this might make me want to pick one up haha
26 year ago i re flashed quite some voodoos and other vga was kind common on some cards with psu blow ups or poor cheap psu back then corrupting them sometimes
I remember Black and white back in high school, very good game. Unfortunately I had bought a S3 Savage card because it was cheap and I was just getting into computers and did not know much. I had to turn the settings down in Black and White but was happy I could play Counter-Strike.
Bioses going bad has me wondering if this is an indication of the lifespan we can expect from Flash chips. 20 years aint bad but magnetic media lasts longer. SSDs are not going to be good for long term storage.
My experience with SSD's has shown ~8 Years
It's interesting that while the downloaded BIOS is 64 KiB in size, SAVE.ROM is only 32 KiB.
The downloaded BIOS is empty after 32 KiB (HEX F-values). When such a BIOS is extracted again, it is saved at 32 KiB. Must be something the tool does.
Since you've never extracted the upper 32k area of the flash memory you also couldn't compare it to that of the downloaded file. NOR flash bits can only be reset after a chip erase set them. Maybe bits in the upper 32k have been reset over time and that caused the issue because the firmware is looking for something there. A chip erase command during the programming will set all bits in the NOR flash to 1 again, which would explain why everything works again after flashing back the old lower 32k content.
Interesting! Yes, you are right. The flashing tool never extracted the remaining 32k. If there was something that caused the problem, it was lost the time the chip was erased.
Since I did not remove the BIOS chip from the card to use a programmer, the upper 32k were not saved.
@@bitsundbolts too bad, yes ;-)
Great, another working card. What is the difference between Voodoo 3 2000 and 3000?
the answer is in the video.
We never installed one, but back when i,was little we had one
I wonder if my Vodoo 2 12MB can be fixed by reflashing its BIOS.
I just stopped working back in the days, somewhere around 99 or 2000..
I couldn't help but to notice that is a pci version of voodoo card not the agp version I'm pretty sure it's limited by the pci interface as it is. But still be interesting to see if oc will get a reasonable performance boost.
Awesome!
I've seen newer components that replace older voltage regulators for ZX Spectrum and some other consoles, they're much more efficient and release much less heat. Maybe that could also be an option for the Voodoo cards?
What's with newer games from 2003-2005?
I also had a similar problem with an nvidia fx 5200. I removed it after it wouldn't show any output and replaced it with a matrox card and when I put the nvidia one back in years later, it suddenly worked
My Voodoo3 2000 used to overclock upto about 150-155 but i think my memory was 7ns
I wonder if this card is able to run two vga-ports?
So why did the bios need reflashing. Wrong bios flash? Info lost from not being powered on for a long time? WHY!!!!
As far as I was told, the card stopped working in 2006. Similar to the GeForce 2MX I had at that time, I imagine that the PC wouldn't show a picture from time to time until reset. It gets worse until it stops completely.
The 3000 was godlike. Being able to play half life on a pentium 200 mmx 🤤
I had to reflash my 56k modem at least three times. I guess flash from back then just sucked.
Its because flash memory wont hold its data after about 10 years right? Seems they have done well to last 20 years or more!
it's possible it just was corrupted somehow. But that might indicate it's starting to fail. I'm willing to bet this card will stop working and not start back up one day.
yes flash it for the 3000
So what if you get a card that has a missing BIOS chip altogether? 😅
On my "restoration" project pile is a Voodoo3 PCI card that doesn't seem to have ever had a BIOS soldered on the board. (just empty pads where a BIOS would would be)
Until I saw Tech Tanglent's video about the Hydro Thunder PCs using "special" 3Dfx cards that contained their initialization routines in a different ROM on the motherboard, I thought I was dealing with a weird factory issue where somebody messed up. (When the BIOS is completely missing, the card shows up in Windows Device Mangler but not with any identifying titles.)
This is new to me as well. I probably would blame the factory as well.
If the PCB of the card is the same as the reference board, I would try to add a bios chip and see what happens. If you're lucky, the flashing tool may just donuts job. But just to be safe, I probably would preflash the chip with the correct BIOS.
@@bitsundbolts I originally suspended my project until I could practice more SMD soldering before adding a BIOS chip. Thankfully I was able to source a chip and socket. Sadly, I'm not sure if the socket will fit in the spot without interfering with nearby passive components so I might just have to go for broke and solder the chip directly.
I did, however, preflash the chip when it arrived to make sure that, at least, was functional.
Your video is an inspiration for me to finish that project up, especially now that I've at least some practice and new tools I didn't originally have when I received the 3dfx cards. Cheers!
I wish you best of luck! You're right, there are plenty of other small SMD components around the BIOS chip pads. But even if you solder the chip directly, it's worth a shot.
What's the song at 5:50?
The song should be linked below the video as part of the video description. The song is called "Kurt" from artist Cheel. Probably a tribute to Kurt Cobain, singer, song-writer and guitarist of the band Nirvana.
@bitsundbolts I see it now thanks.
Meybe some voodoo magic also needed to fix this Voodoo 3
I need to do this to mine I think. It works intermittently- either that or my CPU overclock is borked. :/ The card is completely stable in game but sometimes my board beeps with Bad Video Card- which is obviously false, since after a few reboots it starts perfectly. This did only start to happen when I added some unsupported RAM though.. some weirdness going on with my RAM, I have two 128MB sticks and a 64MB stick, when only the 128mb sticks are installed it detects 128MB when the 64mb stick is installed in the last slot it bumps the total to 256.. idk what's going on with this machine lmfao
The issue with the card is very similar to what I have experienced with my Geforce2 MX. At some point, it stopped completely - and the reason seems to be the BIOS chip slowly losing data integrity. A reflash of the BIOS chip should help.
@@bitsundbolts I replaced a memory module and it stopped doing it. I’m still going to flash most likely- my card is stable at 3000 speeds so no reason I shouldn’t flash 3000 bios. My case has a side fan blowing air directly over the card it’s perfect
Right, it could be related to other hardware in your system. I would try to run everything at stock speed and see if the bad video card error disappears. Then you can reinstate the overclock one by one testing each over a few days to make sure it's stable. It's a tedious process
i have a evilking 3 ( Voodoo 3 ) same no video no idea why
I would start by looking at the BIOS. Could be the exact same issue I had here with this Voodoo 3.
Flash it already!
"Product of Mexico" There's your answer.
Oh you mean other than being nearly 30 years old?
vor 3 weeks i see the Exakt Problem and Soluten with a Geforce RTX 2080 😂
1:08 cap missing, strangely you glossed over it
flashing it dusted off some cobwebs then it worked.