I hadn't read fully the title ( _3Dfx Voodoo Powered Motherboard_ was more than enough for me to click at speed of light) so when you said _I'm gonna transplant 16MB of SG RAM from this Matrox_ I was like, "what? No for sure he is joking!" Usually people that owns this mainboard is scared even to look at it (and who can blame them?), never thought I would seen somebody with the balls and skills to transplant new video RAM modules on it! I mean, I do overclocking on old hardware all the time, but this is completely another level, man! You have all my respect, really, this was fantastic to watch!
Thanks! I only recently got into these more brazen hardware mods. It's a bit addictive, not gonna lie, and it doesn't help that both of these types of chip replacement mods I've got on video have resulted in huge performance gains. Fortunately I've advanced in my soldering skills to a point that I was more worried about trashing the RAM sockets because of how close they were to the one memory chip than actually messing up the motherboard itself. I figured worst case I could just put the original memory back. I spent years trying to find a 16MB version of this board and, well, I don't have to anymore!
@@DKJones96 sure, when you know what you are doing it's kind of safe and "easy", but still remarkable I'd say, given the type of hardware! Ah, the all-red caps are very cool 😎
I have a lead on a 6168 locally, with slightly chipped chipset and fairly poor condition. I took a good look at it and said to myself "If I brought back a Gigabyte 7DXE in a similar fashion, a 3dfx+MSI combo ain't no stranger to me". Price is steep as hell but that won't stop me. I will personally declare if that thing is dead or not. Speaking of which... anyone know if it'll take a different V3 BIOS? I recall 2000s being able to be upgraded to 3000/3500 BIOS since they share the same core, but that might've been just me.
Wow this is a massive improvement! Too often if a motherboard has onboard graphics, they equip it with inadequate memory, and there's no way for an average user to do anything about it except put in a new card. This is an interesting what-if on what would happen if one could add more memory. And yeah I'm surprised and impressed you were able to do it without melting the RAM slots or anything else! Admittedly I lost track of what registers you changed and went back on, etc. But hey it works and that's all that matters.
For this particular motherboard it definitely had going for it that there was a 16MB model, even if I couldn't find one to see what the resistor settings would have been. That would have saved a couple days of thinking for sure. I went ahead and made a couple of slides that show the jumpers I ultimately changed in the description. It ended up being only 1 resistor move and the removal of a jumper and installation of two more. I don't expect many people will undertake this upgrade but it's good to have the info out there.
So memory is the main reason why intergrated graphics is usually few levels below their "regular" counterparts? Not sure if I ever will have to chance to use this knowledge, but it's good to know nonethleless...
I have my limits for sure but I did fix a Voodoo 1 by taking a Dremel to the chip where some pins had broken off and soldering some tiny wires to the leads inside the plastic chip package. imgur.com/hvEiURv Cheers!
Thanks! It can definitely be hard to find a decent balance. I left quite a bit of footage on the cutting room floor because my yammering didn't really accomplish anything moving the video forward and there was already 4 minutes of talking at the beginning. I feel like I could have used a bit more of the benchmarks(it is the fun part after all) but my Windows XP capture machine is in need of some TLC apparently as it fought me by refusing to boot without a BSOD until the system was warm every time.
Thanks for such a nice and interesting video! Have you ever seen the kind of tower these boards cane in? I was surprised with a PB tower I got for super cheap that had a Slot-1 with an integrated ATI 128 but it still need a full re cap.
Thank you! You know, I don't think I've ever actually seen what the original PB tower looks like. All I could even find online was photos and videos of a build someone did with the motherboard shown here and not the actual OEM build.
I should probably note - some of these boards come with 16MB chips that are blocked down to 8MB due to the absence of a 472 SMD resistor. I did a post on Reddit about mine and how it came with that very same memory chip model (except its suffix which only indicates frequency, mine is 143 and K2's is 166, but both can do 166 ez.) from factory, yet MSI left the pads at R658 empty. I only had to add the 472 SMD resistor on there on mine and I unlocked the full 16MB. In conclusion, MSI recycled some of the 16MB boards sometime later in the 6168's lifecycle as 8MB boards by leaving out a single resistor. The easiest way to find if you have a 16MB board toned down to 8MB, is by checking R685 and R687 - if you have two zero-ohm bridges in those two spots ALREADY populated from factory, and R686 is empty, chances are you have a 16MB board and the only modification required is adding a 472 resistor at R658.
I was unable to salvage the one I pulled from a packard bell - it was that badly damaged by all of its caps failing. The FSP PSU and Pentium III 650 that came with it live on however.
Ahh man. F. Being in vintage computing we inevitably run into those and it sucks big time. I've currently got a Voodoo 2 project going where I'm having to grind back the chip plastic to make new legs for them and whew is it driving me nuts. The card got some sort of chemical on it that attacked it pretty badly.
To do this I would need to find a Slot 1 or Socket 370 motherboard and buy some AGP Voodoo cards. I only have PCI Voodoo expansion cards anymore due to previous frustrations with AGP compatibility when a PCI card will work in almost anything with a PCI slot and it's only a small performance penalty. As it stands, the AGP Voodoo 3 2000 on this motherboard is faster than the PCI version in this same motherboard when they both have 16MB of VRAM. It's not a huge difference as the Voodoo card doesn't take advantage of any of the special AGP features but the data throughput of AGP is twice that of PCI so you get a bit of a bump. In fact, that fast transfer rate is probably why the pre-mod 8MB setup held its own as well as it did.
@@DKJones96 If it's true (Not that I'm questioning your experience), then 3dfx had perfect way to increase their presence in OEM market. Too bad they had to make almost all board manufacturers their direct competitor by aquisition of STB. One more reason why we should consider this entire deal main reason of 3dfx's downfall.
@@TurboMMaster I don't know that I would say STB was the entire reason but it didn't help. There are tons and tons of STB Voodoo cards out there and the Voodoo 3 sold like hot cakes at the time but there is an argument to be made that the Riva TNT and Rage 128 got a substantial bump from card makers during a crucial time for 3Dfx. I think either way their demise was inevitable when they got caught with their pants down on the GeForce 256 release. The 256s integrated T&L and the VSA-100s high cost really bit them and there wasn't any way for them to recover from that set-back.
@@DKJones96 That's such a cool piece of tech! An onboard V3! How did I not even know they existed? Ha. Cool videos by the way. Been watching a lot some very interesting ones. Thanks.
Sadly, mine doesn’t work (unless I plug an external PCI video card. The onboard Voodoo is dead (it doesn’t even get hot, as if it’s not receiving power). :(
Oh no! It might not be getting power if that's the case which can be a good thing. Semiconductors like to fail shorted so if it was getting really hot with nothing the chip needs replaced but it's much easier to work on an external part like a regulator. The Voodoo card needs about 2.75V so it will have its own power regulator on the board. I would have to pull mine out of the case to try and find out which one it is but I imagine if you fired it up, ran it for a few minutes, and then shut it down you could feel around for the bad regulator as it would be cold compared to the others on the board. I've thought of messing with this regulator to adjust voltage since the 3500 runs about 3V at 183MHz so to get that kind of overclock stable most Voodoo 3s will need to see a slight bump. I decided against it but the card definitely has its own power regulator. If the regulator needs replaced you'll definitely need a board pre-heater and a good heat gun those FETs are really soldered on there.
My 6168 motherboard make 493 point in 3d mark 2000. My similar config with PCI V3 2000 make 2000 point. 6168 Fast like Velocity 100 in 3d :) Only one ROPs enabled? How to diagnostic? My version is first gen 6168 without TV out. Thank you.
The motherboard should have both TMUs running as it is just a V3 2K onboard. You can check it using the mojo utility if you download and install the 3dfx SDK package that can be found online. It'll report to you exactly what the GPU is seeing.
I wish. It turns out that even with the most up to date BIOS this board just doesn't support Tualatin chips, contrary to what I've read online. To get 1.2GHz I will have to overclock a 100MHz bus model coppermine. Shockingly, they offered up to 1GHz in the 100MHz models so in theory you should be able to attain 1.33GHz if you can eek that out of your sample. I, unfortunately, don't have one of them. From what I can tell this board just can't do the lower voltages required by the Tualatin models.
Great video. Saw it when you published it and thought it was a great mod. Now i finally got the same motherboard and trying to do the same, even got the ram chips from a matrox g400. But still... Have watched the video like 4 times and still its unclear to me which resistors need to be moved in the end :) could you please give me an advice? Thanks. What temp did you use for desokdering the chips with hot air?
Oh, yeah it was hard to convey in the video, if you look at the video description I posted a link to the final changes for the resistors. They are images but tell the whole story will enough. Hope the mod goes well! Let me know if you have any other questions!
@@DKJones96 thanks for replying. Yes. The images are great. I was wondering the temp you used in hot air station, because removing the ram from the Matrox I ripped off a pad... Don't want that to happen with the motherboard... I used a lot of flux but looks like they were really well attached... That had never happened to me
What kind of CPU did you end up going with? And what is the quake 3 arena timedemo1 average fps on that machine? Curious as I want to compare it to some of my retro systems 🤙 Sweet sd800 dual floppy 👌
Yes, the timedemo is a VGA capture from this system. Processor was a P3 Coppermine at 900MHz and the GPU was at stock 143MHz. I run it at 1.2GHz now(9x 133MHz bus) and the GPU is at 166MHz. It sped the benchmarks up with both the GPU and CPU speed up so there is possibly more that can be eeked out if I really wanted to.
What resolution were you running for those fps numbers in quake 3? 42.9fps to 62.4fps with the memory upgrade? Also, any noteable graphics settings in the game that I should take note of? Thanks! 🤙
Thank you very much! I want to install a Tualatin 1.2GHz but I can't get it to post with that so I'm back at 1.0GHz Coppermine. I'm going to try a BIOS update on it and hope that works. I've talked to a person on eBay that services these boards and he says they run just fine. We will see. As for RAM, it has 512MB installed now. Doesn't sound like much these days but even 256MB was plenty for what I'm doing. That being said, I found 2x 256MB Crucial CAS2 PC-133 RAM sticks and really wanted to use them to top the machine off.
@@DKJones96 Well coincidences like this are strange indeed; a 16mb MSI MS-6168 Ver.2 came up for sale yesterday, and I bought it. I've been looking for any 6168 for a while, I wasn't even aware of the 16mb version, and the day after watching your video I find one. Whatever strings you pulled for me, thanks lol! When it arrives I'll send you the ram chip part numbers. They'll probably be the same, but who knows with 90's video cards? Every voodoo 2 I own has different memory.
@@phillycheesetake I watched that auction! In the photos it looked to be the same Samsung part numbers as best I could tell. If you let me know though I will add them to my info here if they are different. That board also has the normal front panel connector which is really nice. Have fun with that thing, it's a rare gem indeed!
@@DKJones96 I noticed the front panel header and Conexant TV-out chip, glad to have both. The board has everything except front USB, which maybe for completeness I'll add, but I hesitate to modify collectable hardware for vanity reasons. If there's evidence that this board as configured sometimes came with it, then sure. I'll let you know on those chips, happy #GPUJune!
@@phillycheesetake When it comes to the USB connector, don't bother... 2 reasons. It's USB 1.1 so it's slow as molasses and it's only one port. The way they do it is a jumper by the PCI slots(J16) deactivates one of the rear ports and connects it to the front. It's way nicer to just get a USB 2.0 PCI card with an internal connector and use that. Plus, that USB connector is a non-standard pinout so you have to modify a standard one to fit. The TV out is a nice feature but I've found it is undocumented so you have to find out what the pinout is(the conexant TV chip connects to the header that is between the ATX power input and the processor socket and it's called J17). On mine, for some reason, when I switch on the TV out I end up with a very dark RGB output but the S-video is fine. Curious if yours does the same! If it does it might explain why it is undocumented. I have the pinout somewhere but it was easy to figure out. It's an S-video output and the pins can be traced back to it just like they can be on a Voodoo card and it will give you what is what if you compare them.
I have a photo gallery in the description that gives a visual of the hardware jumper changes. imgur.com/gallery/LAt1McR On this board, Chip Select is normally attached to the Bank 0 output on the GPU in the 8MB configuration. Fairly normal but kind of unnecessary since there is only ever one bank! I can only guess that there are problems if you drive an output like that with no load so they did this as a way to prevent it. What I end up doing for this upgrade is grounding chip select on the SGRAM and Bank 0 output goes to Address line 11. Toggling the address line on the module looks like a second bank to the GPU which uses the rest of the address lines as usual so we get 16MB. Typically you will have 2MB SGRAM modules on a Voodoo 3 card and it isn't really setup for using 4x 4MB modules. Kind of cool how they worked that out. I think only one model of 16MB AGP cards run 4x 4MB as well.
I have noticed that the foil will get warm and melt stuff. I'm picking up some wide kapton tape that I can use for masking stuff like this. Thanks for the info!
And I help you a little bit. NFS2SE working good with stock 8mb. Use older refence driver. Mistake is same with Velocity 100 8mb. Newer driver bug with 8mb cards. th-cam.com/video/TxxgyoY28bQ/w-d-xo.html
I was a bit but after doing some other soldering I was more confident in my skills. The chips were a bit more difficult to get to on the motherboard than on the graphics card but that shouldn't matter too much if you kinda know what you are doing. In my 386SX to 486SLC video the soldering went fine and if I had botched that I definitely wouldn't have tried this one!
very interesting, good point take modules from Matrox card
I always love when there's hardware modifications.
I hadn't read fully the title ( _3Dfx Voodoo Powered Motherboard_ was more than enough for me to click at speed of light) so when you said _I'm gonna transplant 16MB of SG RAM from this Matrox_ I was like, "what? No for sure he is joking!" Usually people that owns this mainboard is scared even to look at it (and who can blame them?), never thought I would seen somebody with the balls and skills to transplant new video RAM modules on it! I mean, I do overclocking on old hardware all the time, but this is completely another level, man! You have all my respect, really, this was fantastic to watch!
Thanks! I only recently got into these more brazen hardware mods. It's a bit addictive, not gonna lie, and it doesn't help that both of these types of chip replacement mods I've got on video have resulted in huge performance gains. Fortunately I've advanced in my soldering skills to a point that I was more worried about trashing the RAM sockets because of how close they were to the one memory chip than actually messing up the motherboard itself. I figured worst case I could just put the original memory back. I spent years trying to find a 16MB version of this board and, well, I don't have to anymore!
@@DKJones96 sure, when you know what you are doing it's kind of safe and "easy", but still remarkable I'd say, given the type of hardware!
Ah, the all-red caps are very cool 😎
I have a lead on a 6168 locally, with slightly chipped chipset and fairly poor condition.
I took a good look at it and said to myself "If I brought back a Gigabyte 7DXE in a similar fashion, a 3dfx+MSI combo ain't no stranger to me".
Price is steep as hell but that won't stop me. I will personally declare if that thing is dead or not.
Speaking of which... anyone know if it'll take a different V3 BIOS? I recall 2000s being able to be upgraded to 3000/3500 BIOS since they share the same core, but that might've been just me.
Thank you for sharing this, I've just successfully done the modification my MS-6168 revision 2 board following the instructions on the imgur post :)
Ahh great! Glad to hear another one got the mod! Crazy that they even sold it with 8MB but I guess that's par for the course for OEM stuff.
Congrats on the upgrade! That Performance boost is well with it 👍
Thanks! I wasn't quite expecting such a huge jump in actual gaming but the results speak for themselves for sure.
Done like a true hardware hacker
Well done!
Awesome memory upgrade. Did you also change Pentium III CPU from 750MHz to 1GHz during tests or just boost FSB to 133MHz?
Although I understud about 7% of what you did, this was a pretty incredible upgrade. Gread job, cool video.
Great stuff. Awesome mod. You can tell allot of research and hard work went into this. Nice board heater, need to get one eventually.
Thanks! 👍
Wow this is a massive improvement! Too often if a motherboard has onboard graphics, they equip it with inadequate memory, and there's no way for an average user to do anything about it except put in a new card. This is an interesting what-if on what would happen if one could add more memory.
And yeah I'm surprised and impressed you were able to do it without melting the RAM slots or anything else! Admittedly I lost track of what registers you changed and went back on, etc. But hey it works and that's all that matters.
For this particular motherboard it definitely had going for it that there was a 16MB model, even if I couldn't find one to see what the resistor settings would have been. That would have saved a couple days of thinking for sure.
I went ahead and made a couple of slides that show the jumpers I ultimately changed in the description. It ended up being only 1 resistor move and the removal of a jumper and installation of two more. I don't expect many people will undertake this upgrade but it's good to have the info out there.
So memory is the main reason why intergrated graphics is usually few levels below their "regular" counterparts? Not sure if I ever will have to chance to use this knowledge, but it's good to know nonethleless...
i love this era of hardware
So nice being able to actually mod it! The skill required to swap out parts on a modern motherboard or video card is much higher than this.
This is insane, balls to the wall.
My two broken voodoo 2 probably would be resurrected by your soldering skills.
I have my limits for sure but I did fix a Voodoo 1 by taking a Dremel to the chip where some pins had broken off and soldering some tiny wires to the leads inside the plastic chip package. imgur.com/hvEiURv Cheers!
@@DKJones96
You and that dude from necroware, truly knows your voodoo stuff :)
Great work and fantastic video. I'm stunned by just how much an improvement it made.
Thank you very much!
enjoyed every minute of this video!
Very cool video. Also, I appreciate your editing. A lot of people leave way to much info in or leave too much out. Very good balance.
Thanks! It can definitely be hard to find a decent balance. I left quite a bit of footage on the cutting room floor because my yammering didn't really accomplish anything moving the video forward and there was already 4 minutes of talking at the beginning. I feel like I could have used a bit more of the benchmarks(it is the fun part after all) but my Windows XP capture machine is in need of some TLC apparently as it fought me by refusing to boot without a BSOD until the system was warm every time.
That's a great mod. I hope you have posted, in detail, all modifications you made so others can do the same.
Dang that's impressive. Nice upgrade and video!
Impressive, congrats!
Thanks!
Very cool, love your work!
Great video! Thanks
Had a Packard Bell with this motherboard back in the day. No AGP slot became a issue later down the line when i wanted to upgrade.
Congrats Sir - amazing work
Thanks for such a nice and interesting video!
Have you ever seen the kind of tower these boards cane in? I was surprised with a PB tower I got for super cheap that had a Slot-1 with an integrated ATI 128 but it still need a full re cap.
Thank you! You know, I don't think I've ever actually seen what the original PB tower looks like. All I could even find online was photos and videos of a build someone did with the motherboard shown here and not the actual OEM build.
I'm so glad I found your channel. Thank you #GPUJune !
You have some immense trust in your skills, my dude.
Great, great video!
Crazy mod seal of approval from me :)
Thanks man! That Rose's Alloy trick would have been nice here!
Sure, but you managed again very well even without this.
You are very skilled with this! I admire skilled people.
I should probably note - some of these boards come with 16MB chips that are blocked down to 8MB due to the absence of a 472 SMD resistor. I did a post on Reddit about mine and how it came with that very same memory chip model (except its suffix which only indicates frequency, mine is 143 and K2's is 166, but both can do 166 ez.) from factory, yet MSI left the pads at R658 empty.
I only had to add the 472 SMD resistor on there on mine and I unlocked the full 16MB. In conclusion, MSI recycled some of the 16MB boards sometime later in the 6168's lifecycle as 8MB boards by leaving out a single resistor. The easiest way to find if you have a 16MB board toned down to 8MB, is by checking R685 and R687 - if you have two zero-ohm bridges in those two spots ALREADY populated from factory, and R686 is empty, chances are you have a 16MB board and the only modification required is adding a 472 resistor at R658.
I was unable to salvage the one I pulled from a packard bell - it was that badly damaged by all of its caps failing. The FSP PSU and Pentium III 650 that came with it live on however.
Ahh man. F. Being in vintage computing we inevitably run into those and it sucks big time. I've currently got a Voodoo 2 project going where I'm having to grind back the chip plastic to make new legs for them and whew is it driving me nuts. The card got some sort of chemical on it that attacked it pretty badly.
Great video!
Awesome video
I own two of these boards. Could you link me to the source of the 4MB vrams?
Now I want to see full benchmarks - I'm mostly interested how MSI-6168 compared to regular Voodoo 3 cards.
To do this I would need to find a Slot 1 or Socket 370 motherboard and buy some AGP Voodoo cards. I only have PCI Voodoo expansion cards anymore due to previous frustrations with AGP compatibility when a PCI card will work in almost anything with a PCI slot and it's only a small performance penalty.
As it stands, the AGP Voodoo 3 2000 on this motherboard is faster than the PCI version in this same motherboard when they both have 16MB of VRAM. It's not a huge difference as the Voodoo card doesn't take advantage of any of the special AGP features but the data throughput of AGP is twice that of PCI so you get a bit of a bump. In fact, that fast transfer rate is probably why the pre-mod 8MB setup held its own as well as it did.
@@DKJones96 If it's true (Not that I'm questioning your experience), then 3dfx had perfect way to increase their presence in OEM market. Too bad they had to make almost all board manufacturers their direct competitor by aquisition of STB. One more reason why we should consider this entire deal main reason of 3dfx's downfall.
@@TurboMMaster I don't know that I would say STB was the entire reason but it didn't help. There are tons and tons of STB Voodoo cards out there and the Voodoo 3 sold like hot cakes at the time but there is an argument to be made that the Riva TNT and Rage 128 got a substantial bump from card makers during a crucial time for 3Dfx.
I think either way their demise was inevitable when they got caught with their pants down on the GeForce 256 release. The 256s integrated T&L and the VSA-100s high cost really bit them and there wasn't any way for them to recover from that set-back.
Now this is good stuff, glad it worked. And thanks for the information!
Where'd you get the me chips?
Me chips?
Wow thats a sick motherboard
Never seen an onboard voodoo motherboard before. At first I noticed the lack of an AGP slot, but I presume the V3 is on an AGP bridge?
The 440-series chipset on this motherboard has AGP support and the Voodoo is directly tied to that.
@@DKJones96 That's such a cool piece of tech! An onboard V3! How did I not even know they existed? Ha.
Cool videos by the way. Been watching a lot some very interesting ones. Thanks.
Sadly, mine doesn’t work (unless I plug an external PCI video card. The onboard Voodoo is dead (it doesn’t even get hot, as if it’s not receiving power). :(
Oh no! It might not be getting power if that's the case which can be a good thing. Semiconductors like to fail shorted so if it was getting really hot with nothing the chip needs replaced but it's much easier to work on an external part like a regulator.
The Voodoo card needs about 2.75V so it will have its own power regulator on the board. I would have to pull mine out of the case to try and find out which one it is but I imagine if you fired it up, ran it for a few minutes, and then shut it down you could feel around for the bad regulator as it would be cold compared to the others on the board.
I've thought of messing with this regulator to adjust voltage since the 3500 runs about 3V at 183MHz so to get that kind of overclock stable most Voodoo 3s will need to see a slight bump. I decided against it but the card definitely has its own power regulator.
If the regulator needs replaced you'll definitely need a board pre-heater and a good heat gun those FETs are really soldered on there.
Cool board, but Why they didnt include agp slot for future upgrade?
My 6168 motherboard make 493 point in 3d mark 2000. My similar config with PCI V3 2000 make 2000 point. 6168 Fast like Velocity 100 in 3d :) Only one ROPs enabled? How to diagnostic? My version is first gen 6168 without TV out. Thank you.
The motherboard should have both TMUs running as it is just a V3 2K onboard. You can check it using the mojo utility if you download and install the 3dfx SDK package that can be found online. It'll report to you exactly what the GPU is seeing.
ah, i wish you had footage of installing the chips
You know, I never thought about that but that is missing! I'll have to make sure I include that for my next chip replacement video.
Really amazing video! I love the memorymod and all the red caps, but you mentioned a 1.2ghz mod? Do you have a followup video with that upgrade?
I wish. It turns out that even with the most up to date BIOS this board just doesn't support Tualatin chips, contrary to what I've read online. To get 1.2GHz I will have to overclock a 100MHz bus model coppermine. Shockingly, they offered up to 1GHz in the 100MHz models so in theory you should be able to attain 1.33GHz if you can eek that out of your sample.
I, unfortunately, don't have one of them. From what I can tell this board just can't do the lower voltages required by the Tualatin models.
Very cool
Great video. Saw it when you published it and thought it was a great mod. Now i finally got the same motherboard and trying to do the same, even got the ram chips from a matrox g400. But still... Have watched the video like 4 times and still its unclear to me which resistors need to be moved in the end :) could you please give me an advice? Thanks. What temp did you use for desokdering the chips with hot air?
Oh, yeah it was hard to convey in the video, if you look at the video description I posted a link to the final changes for the resistors. They are images but tell the whole story will enough.
Hope the mod goes well! Let me know if you have any other questions!
@@DKJones96 thanks for replying. Yes. The images are great. I was wondering the temp you used in hot air station, because removing the ram from the Matrox I ripped off a pad... Don't want that to happen with the motherboard... I used a lot of flux but looks like they were really well attached... That had never happened to me
What kind of CPU did you end up going with?
And what is the quake 3 arena timedemo1 average fps on that machine? Curious as I want to compare it to some of my retro systems 🤙
Sweet sd800 dual floppy 👌
Yes, the timedemo is a VGA capture from this system. Processor was a P3 Coppermine at 900MHz and the GPU was at stock 143MHz. I run it at 1.2GHz now(9x 133MHz bus) and the GPU is at 166MHz. It sped the benchmarks up with both the GPU and CPU speed up so there is possibly more that can be eeked out if I really wanted to.
What resolution were you running for those fps numbers in quake 3?
42.9fps to 62.4fps with the memory upgrade?
Also, any noteable graphics settings in the game that I should take note of?
Thanks! 🤙
Dude, you absolutely win GPU June! What a fantastic video.
Which CPU and memory are you going with?
Thank you very much!
I want to install a Tualatin 1.2GHz but I can't get it to post with that so I'm back at 1.0GHz Coppermine. I'm going to try a BIOS update on it and hope that works. I've talked to a person on eBay that services these boards and he says they run just fine. We will see.
As for RAM, it has 512MB installed now. Doesn't sound like much these days but even 256MB was plenty for what I'm doing. That being said, I found 2x 256MB Crucial CAS2 PC-133 RAM sticks and really wanted to use them to top the machine off.
@@DKJones96 Well coincidences like this are strange indeed; a 16mb MSI MS-6168 Ver.2 came up for sale yesterday, and I bought it. I've been looking for any 6168 for a while, I wasn't even aware of the 16mb version, and the day after watching your video I find one. Whatever strings you pulled for me, thanks lol!
When it arrives I'll send you the ram chip part numbers. They'll probably be the same, but who knows with 90's video cards? Every voodoo 2 I own has different memory.
@@phillycheesetake I watched that auction! In the photos it looked to be the same Samsung part numbers as best I could tell. If you let me know though I will add them to my info here if they are different. That board also has the normal front panel connector which is really nice.
Have fun with that thing, it's a rare gem indeed!
@@DKJones96 I noticed the front panel header and Conexant TV-out chip, glad to have both. The board has everything except front USB, which maybe for completeness I'll add, but I hesitate to modify collectable hardware for vanity reasons. If there's evidence that this board as configured sometimes came with it, then sure.
I'll let you know on those chips, happy #GPUJune!
@@phillycheesetake When it comes to the USB connector, don't bother... 2 reasons. It's USB 1.1 so it's slow as molasses and it's only one port. The way they do it is a jumper by the PCI slots(J16) deactivates one of the rear ports and connects it to the front. It's way nicer to just get a USB 2.0 PCI card with an internal connector and use that. Plus, that USB connector is a non-standard pinout so you have to modify a standard one to fit.
The TV out is a nice feature but I've found it is undocumented so you have to find out what the pinout is(the conexant TV chip connects to the header that is between the ATX power input and the processor socket and it's called J17). On mine, for some reason, when I switch on the TV out I end up with a very dark RGB output but the S-video is fine. Curious if yours does the same! If it does it might explain why it is undocumented. I have the pinout somewhere but it was easy to figure out. It's an S-video output and the pins can be traced back to it just like they can be on a Voodoo card and it will give you what is what if you compare them.
For a motherboard this rare, I would never dare to do any modifications, unless absolutely necessary. If things go bad, you won't find a replacement.
super cute exotic rarity pancake
Would that setup be able to run a modern Linux iso and be able to adequately play TH-cam?
so did you jumper over the chip select???? you forgot to tell us what you actually did
I have a photo gallery in the description that gives a visual of the hardware jumper changes.
imgur.com/gallery/LAt1McR
On this board, Chip Select is normally attached to the Bank 0 output on the GPU in the 8MB configuration. Fairly normal but kind of unnecessary since there is only ever one bank! I can only guess that there are problems if you drive an output like that with no load so they did this as a way to prevent it. What I end up doing for this upgrade is grounding chip select on the SGRAM and Bank 0 output goes to Address line 11. Toggling the address line on the module looks like a second bank to the GPU which uses the rest of the address lines as usual so we get 16MB. Typically you will have 2MB SGRAM modules on a Voodoo 3 card and it isn't really setup for using 4x 4MB modules. Kind of cool how they worked that out. I think only one model of 16MB AGP cards run 4x 4MB as well.
Always wondering is this possible
Not always possible but it was here! I really didn't want to mess up this motherboard and I'm glad it came out so well in the end. Still using it!
I want to see that poor matrox get the ram chips from the mobo 😅
Use Kapton tape, not foil. It's safer.
I have noticed that the foil will get warm and melt stuff. I'm picking up some wide kapton tape that I can use for masking stuff like this. Thanks for the info!
it is hard to collect
And I help you a little bit. NFS2SE working good with stock 8mb. Use older refence driver. Mistake is same with Velocity 100 8mb. Newer driver bug with 8mb cards. th-cam.com/video/TxxgyoY28bQ/w-d-xo.html
Scary soldering and removal, were you worried you'd break it?
I was a bit but after doing some other soldering I was more confident in my skills. The chips were a bit more difficult to get to on the motherboard than on the graphics card but that shouldn't matter too much if you kinda know what you are doing.
In my 386SX to 486SLC video the soldering went fine and if I had botched that I definitely wouldn't have tried this one!
@@DKJones96 nice i wish i could solder good.
@@wowitsshit9734 we all have to start somewhere!