The only purpose of the holes at 22:59 are to conductively transfer heat between the PCB layers. There's no airflow. They're just vias. The vias are also offset from the BGA balls so the balls can be soldered to the same copper fill the vias are on.
Actually, it's better to fill the vias with solder, since as we know air insulates. The big square on the back where they left the solder mask, greatly increases thermals. There are tons of papers and other good reads on this. I don't know why they did it this way. I design PCBs myself professionally and the default practice these days is to fill these kinds of vias. If I remember well, back in the day this process used to be a bit more troublesome because of warping etc. But it has been awhile so I don't quite remember anymore. These days it's definitely not an issue anymore.
@@p_mouse8676 Very interesting! Thanks for sharing this. Would be an interesting experiment to try. You've got me thinking now :D .. I will definitely revisit this in part 2.
@@vswitchzero unfortunately we can't share any links. So my apologies to say it this way, but by a quick online search with: pcb via thermal resistance, you'll find plenty of information and articles. It actually makes me wonder where the heat spot is on those IC's 🤔 Because with some of them, like a regular ThinPak package (MOSFET or so), the heat lug is on the bottom side, not on the top. So in some cases it's a better idea to put a heatsink on the other side of the PCB, where you see the vias.
My VooDoo 3 3000 use to get crazy hot and I had plenty of cooling near it. I ended up putting a 60mm fan on the heat sink and that kept the card much cooler. I put a 40mm fan on top where the holes were and that helped a lot too. I still have a few of the VooDoo 3 3000 cards around somewhere and a couple of VooDoo 5 5500s. I have been thinking about building a vintage PC and putting one of the VooDoo cards in it.
TBH i'm not fond of Voodoo using a linear regulator to power the graphics processor and then dumping all of that heat into the PCB. The processor running at what 2.9V i think or less? so 60% of the 5V power goes to the processor, 40% drops on the regulator, which is PSB-cooled. There are scant handful points of thermal via stitching under the regulator and all the near radiation area is mask covered. For a thermally spicy card, this level of sloppy design makes me want to scream.
Great job as always, I find your SMD soldering very therapeutic 😂 and yeah, I agree, you can't have too much flux, really helps things go where you want. V interested to see your over clocking experiments.
I owned a Voodoo3 1000 back in the day. Bought it (apparently) new from the local computer parts shop. It came in a plain white box. It had no heatsink and ran at 125MHz. I never had any trouble with it. It ran Descent 3 and UT '99 flawlessly. I sold it on eBay a few years back, and the buyer messaged me afterward asking what happened to the heatsink...
Interesting! I had always assumed it was big OEMs only that had these but maybe smaller sellers could get quantity lots of these too. Do you remember what the cost was like compared to a retail V3 by chance?
@@vswitchzero I found a spreadsheet from August 2000 where I specced out a PC build for a friend. I listed the Voodoo3 1000 OEM at $52, which I think was roughly half the cost of a retail Voodoo3 card at the time. I tried to corroborate this with the Wayback machine but unfortunately they didn't crawl this computer store's price list during the time window the card was available.
About the sonic cleaner, please, get a not-too-expensive one, even the cheap ones are not bad, after you have it in your toolset, you'll use to a great extent! Definitely worth it!
There is Belorussian ESR meter miron63 that can peroform in-circuit measuring of the (non-parallel) capacitors. Not so cheap and pretty hard to obtain due to sanctions but working as a charm.
I have a funny experience with an OEM Compaq Voodoo 3 1000.... It looked like a Banshee to me, and i found it coincidentally in my huge piles of cards years back... So i thought, i would do a nice SS7 Banshee build and got everything ready, yeah incl Banshee drivers. Now guess what happened? I thought it was fu**ed up because none of my drivers worked on it, until the non original heatsink fell off.... And there i had the enlightening moment. Haha damn! These are rare cards. Worked weill with 166mhz clock speed, still does..
FYI SGRAM is used on the very first Creative Geforce 256 card. I have one here given to me by a friend 18 years ago that was cooked when the fan failed. The card still works but it has a grey haze over the top of the image. I swapped out all the SGRAMs for new parts but that didn't fix it so obviously the grahpics chip was internally damaged.
This is a common issue with GF 256s unfortunately. The analog output part of the core seems to degrade and the signal gets really weak over time and you get all sorts of image quality problems like a darker image, washed out colours, and shadows/smearing. Could be due to overheating perhaps. I have a creative labs card with this issue and hope to do a video on it some day. It had a dying fan on it when I got it.
Shhhh, you're lettin' the secret out, lol! About a year ago I had this same thought process when I got a Voodoo 3 1000 with that 5.5ns memory. With JUST active cooling, I could overclock to about 150MHz IIRC. Then I increased voltage to match a V3 3000, and I'm stable at 186MHz.
That may be because of the different ceramic material. The two (three) most stable materials are C0G (aka NP0) and X5R/X7R. The former has lower specific capacitance but is more stable and the tolerance smaller (5% not hard to find). Typically used for signal and high frequency. Grey-sh colour. The latter is for everything above 100nF (depending on voltage and room on the board). Light brown colour.
10:14 Best way to avoid losing it while loose is to simply turn the cap 90 degrees and leave soldered to the board. Then you can measure it and know it won't dissappear into space if you slip with the probes.
I used to get these and just glue a small little fan powered heatsink on them with thermal glue. That always worked pretty well actually. Wasn't there a tool to OC the memory as well?
Thanks for watching! The V3 and V4/5 have their memory clock synchronized with the core. So as I increase the clock, both core and memory are overclocked. As far as I know only the Banshee had async core/memory clock control.
Been a viewer for a long while now & love the videos. Seeings as this video is framed in such a lovely shot at the beggining it has jogged my memory on a question ive had forever. Is that a cherry ML4100? 😂 ive been wondering what keyboard that was for the better part of a year or so.
Thanks very much! 😁 Yep! It’s a cherry ML4100 (exact model number is G84-4100PPAUS). The layout takes some getting used to but perfect for a cramped test bench setup 👍
I wonder if it wouldn't be a good idea to reflow the BGA while it's being worked on? There are a number of DIY BGA rework machines using IR heater beds and PID controllers. A really good one would cost about 200 bucks to build and you could use it on a lot of projects I bet
I think there was some kind of an registry hack to unlock the 2nd TMU on these cards, at least the Velocity 100 cards mit 8 megs. But don't quote me on that.
Thanks! I bought a few of these for really cheap ($20 or so) on Amazon a few years ago. If you search for “ATX test bench” you’ll see very similar benches. They seem to be a bit more expensive today though unfortunately.
I also have a voodoo 3 1000, and upon digging mine out, it turned out mine is _also_ rocking 5.5ns Siemens chips. Now if I could only get mine working properly
At the time of the tnt2 and gf2 mx that came with dell or hp they didn't have a heatsink, nvidia or manufacturers sold variants on the market too, I recently got a pentium 4 with a Quadro 2 MR agp without a heatsink, I don't know how it survived.
I had a 3dfx Velocity 100 back in those days. With a small fan added on to the GPU heatsink I was able to OC mine to 155 MHz on the regular. Enabled the 2nd TMU via a registry tweak. For the relatively small amount I paid for the card then it was a mostly wonderful upgrade from the 3dfx Banshee card, even though it had half as much VRAM as the Banshee. That was the only time I've ever done a video card upgrade and ended up with a faster card that had less VRAM on it!
Silicon magic made 200mhz SGRAM. Part number SM84L512K32.. wonder how hard it would be to get some and try to take the record for fastest Voodoo 3. Around 210-220mhz is the peak that I remember for SDRAM versions with 5.5ns memory back in the day.
I also have the Hakko 888D that vswitchzero is using but it's not very new tech. There are newer styles of irons that heat up faster and work better for reworking components near large ground planes.
@@kunka592 I believe Hakko finally end-of-lifed the 888d actually. Its been a great iron for my purposes but I agree - I'm sure there are much better ones out there by Hakko and other companies too.
Super nervous at you soldering next to the edge connector like that, without covering it with some tape. If you feel confident about it that's fine but it's so easy to get a little bit of solder on there, ruining the gold plating.
2:08 I pulled the trigger on the ultrasonic, absolutely indispensible. I have my hierarchy. Paint brush for easy dust, soap/water for sensitive components plus contact cleaner, and the ultrasonic for components that have it caked on and corrosion.
21:00 Linus, a few years ago, did a video about a small US company making their own thermal glue. Since there are no mounting holes and I don't often trust adhesives as I've had heatsinks fall off components that way, I think gluing a small copper heatsink to the core could do wonders for the longevity of the card.
I remember this as well! Yeah I really don’t trust thermal adhesive tape. One major problem is that the v3 chip is slightly concave so it only makes good contact on the edges. It needs extra material in the centre for good contact. Thanks for watching!
That was Tech Ingredients and they have a VERY exciting channel of their own. Explosions, lasers, alcohol, jet engines, you name it, highly recommended. Honestly the thermal adhesive tape works JUST FINE, the stuff that often comes on the heatsinks preapplied. It's not going anywhere at that size and its thermal properties well they're better than nothing. Other decent option is the type of silicone used in power supplies, i buy cheap K704 or 705. Its thermal conductivity and adhesion are eerily decent. I really wouldn't want to epoxy a heatsink on there, i just think it's not very elegant.
Just use the cheap white thermal glue in the corners, and regular thermal compound in the center. I find the cheap stuff sets up more like silicone caulk than an epoxy, so it's easy to remove, so easy that accidently bumping the heatsink is enough sometimes.
Arctic Silver still makes thermal adhesives, but honestly just do it like we do an IHS after a CPU delid. Use regular paste and silicone / automotive emblem adhesive on the edge.
Btw the K705 thermal conductivity is claimed to be 1.6W/mK. It would be scary good if it was that high, i bet it's lower, on the order of half that, but as i said, decent, and it's quite inexpensive. For comparison, while high-performance pastes usually claim to have 5-10W/mK, their real thermal conductivity is usually around 3-4, and white paste is 0.9 W/mK. 15 years ago, AS5 was popular, claiming 4.7, but in reality being 1.0. It is to be said that these figures are probably a bad way to describe the performance of thermal paste, since it characterises the thermal impedance of the bulk material, while most of the real-use thermal impedance occurs at boundaries where it contacts other material, and can't be described with a single number. Oh i also have another insight, a somewhat unrelated one, if you don't need monstrously high thermal conductivity, and let's face it, the thermal flux off these chips and classic computing stuff in general isn't THAT high, unlike today, cheap white thermal paste lasts much longer than the nicest high-performance pastes. You could open up a random piece of equipment from 20-30 years ago and the white stuff is fresh like day 1. I got myself some HY410 for the purposes and tortured it under extreme temperatures and dumb storage conditions and it looks super promising, it's extremely difficult to induce any breakdown at all, while even the normally considered super trustworthy performance optimised stuff like mx2, mx4 already separates just a little in the tube.
Thanks very much! .. Haven't seen a single 3dfx item go for anywhere near $20 for a very long time around here. You can't even buy a 3dfx driver CD or a slot bracket on eBay for that these days haha
I pour 100% IPA on it and then datavac (blower fan) all the alcohol out. I still wait a day before using electronics but it's probably not even required.
The only purpose of the holes at 22:59 are to conductively transfer heat between the PCB layers. There's no airflow. They're just vias. The vias are also offset from the BGA balls so the balls can be soldered to the same copper fill the vias are on.
I didn’t think of that! Makes perfect sense, thanks for sharing 🙂👍
Actually, it's better to fill the vias with solder, since as we know air insulates.
The big square on the back where they left the solder mask, greatly increases thermals.
There are tons of papers and other good reads on this.
I don't know why they did it this way. I design PCBs myself professionally and the default practice these days is to fill these kinds of vias.
If I remember well, back in the day this process used to be a bit more troublesome because of warping etc. But it has been awhile so I don't quite remember anymore.
These days it's definitely not an issue anymore.
@@p_mouse8676 Very interesting! Thanks for sharing this. Would be an interesting experiment to try. You've got me thinking now :D .. I will definitely revisit this in part 2.
@@vswitchzero unfortunately we can't share any links. So my apologies to say it this way, but by a quick online search with: pcb via thermal resistance, you'll find plenty of information and articles.
It actually makes me wonder where the heat spot is on those IC's 🤔
Because with some of them, like a regular ThinPak package (MOSFET or so), the heat lug is on the bottom side, not on the top.
So in some cases it's a better idea to put a heatsink on the other side of the PCB, where you see the vias.
I just LOVED the time back then when you could buy a Celeron A333 for a 550mhz Pentium 2 killer or a budget voodoo 1000 card for 3000 performance.
My VooDoo 3 3000 use to get crazy hot and I had plenty of cooling near it. I ended up putting a 60mm fan on the heat sink and that kept the card much cooler. I put a 40mm fan on top where the holes were and that helped a lot too. I still have a few of the VooDoo 3 3000 cards around somewhere and a couple of VooDoo 5 5500s. I have been thinking about building a vintage PC and putting one of the VooDoo cards in it.
TBH i'm not fond of Voodoo using a linear regulator to power the graphics processor and then dumping all of that heat into the PCB. The processor running at what 2.9V i think or less? so 60% of the 5V power goes to the processor, 40% drops on the regulator, which is PSB-cooled. There are scant handful points of thermal via stitching under the regulator and all the near radiation area is mask covered. For a thermally spicy card, this level of sloppy design makes me want to scream.
Soap and water FTW. 🎉
SoopyWooders team
Will be waiting for part 2 eagerly.
Great content! And 30min repairing and optimizing 3dfx cards is not long at all.
Thanks very much! 🙂👍
Love that Retro Inside sticker.
Lucky find! Two working cards with minimum effort for cheap, can't beat that
You make the world a better place.
Great stuff! Looking forward to the second part!
Great job as always, I find your SMD soldering very therapeutic 😂 and yeah, I agree, you can't have too much flux, really helps things go where you want. V interested to see your over clocking experiments.
I owned a Voodoo3 1000 back in the day. Bought it (apparently) new from the local computer parts shop. It came in a plain white box. It had no heatsink and ran at 125MHz. I never had any trouble with it. It ran Descent 3 and UT '99 flawlessly. I sold it on eBay a few years back, and the buyer messaged me afterward asking what happened to the heatsink...
Interesting! I had always assumed it was big OEMs only that had these but maybe smaller sellers could get quantity lots of these too. Do you remember what the cost was like compared to a retail V3 by chance?
@@vswitchzero I found a spreadsheet from August 2000 where I specced out a PC build for a friend. I listed the Voodoo3 1000 OEM at $52, which I think was roughly half the cost of a retail Voodoo3 card at the time. I tried to corroborate this with the Wayback machine but unfortunately they didn't crawl this computer store's price list during the time window the card was available.
Love those close-up shots of the soldering work. Really need to get me one of those microscopes at some point!
Totally worth it! There are lots of options for around $100 or so. My eyes would never allow me to be able to do these repairs without one 🙂
About the sonic cleaner, please, get a not-too-expensive one, even the cheap ones are not bad, after you have it in your toolset, you'll use to a great extent! Definitely worth it!
The more I look into them the more I want one! Could be useful for many things, that’s for sure.
Nice! Looking forward to part 2!
Thanks! Already working on it. Hopefully the wait won’t be too long 🙂
There is Belorussian ESR meter miron63 that can peroform in-circuit measuring of the (non-parallel) capacitors. Not so cheap and pretty hard to obtain due to sanctions but working as a charm.
I have one of these definitely interested to see what you end up doing to them in part2
You got a good start for your own component map for that card.
Very true! If I ever find a totally dead V3 1000 I may go on a desoldering spree and put a proper one together 🙂
Thanks again! What is the testbench you are using? I want one of those 😊 Can you please tell me?
I have a funny experience with an OEM Compaq Voodoo 3 1000.... It looked like a Banshee to me, and i found it coincidentally in my huge piles of cards years back... So i thought, i would do a nice SS7 Banshee build and got everything ready, yeah incl Banshee drivers. Now guess what happened? I thought it was fu**ed up because none of my drivers worked on it, until the non original heatsink fell off.... And there i had the enlightening moment. Haha damn! These are rare cards. Worked weill with 166mhz clock speed, still does..
FYI SGRAM is used on the very first Creative Geforce 256 card. I have one here given to me by a friend 18 years ago that was cooked when the fan failed. The card still works but it has a grey haze over the top of the image. I swapped out all the SGRAMs for new parts but that didn't fix it so obviously the grahpics chip was internally damaged.
This is a common issue with GF 256s unfortunately. The analog output part of the core seems to degrade and the signal gets really weak over time and you get all sorts of image quality problems like a darker image, washed out colours, and shadows/smearing. Could be due to overheating perhaps. I have a creative labs card with this issue and hope to do a video on it some day. It had a dying fan on it when I got it.
Ahh Quake3.
I was playing regularly and seriously for more than 10 years!
Shhhh, you're lettin' the secret out, lol! About a year ago I had this same thought process when I got a Voodoo 3 1000 with that 5.5ns memory. With JUST active cooling, I could overclock to about 150MHz IIRC. Then I increased voltage to match a V3 3000, and I'm stable at 186MHz.
Very interesting video
My Voodoo3s have heatsinks on the backside of the card too, just behind the chip. Helps cooling.
I've recently learned that the darkest caps are usually µF range, ligher are nF and almost white ones are in pF range.
Very interesting! I had always wondered about that. Thanks for sharing
That may be because of the different ceramic material.
The two (three) most stable materials are C0G (aka NP0) and X5R/X7R.
The former has lower specific capacitance but is more stable and the tolerance smaller (5% not hard to find). Typically used for signal and high frequency. Grey-sh colour.
The latter is for everything above 100nF (depending on voltage and room on the board). Light brown colour.
The 0603 caps are about 1.50€ for 100 pcs. The bag they individually pack them in is worth more than 2 pcs, not to mention the postal fee.
10:14 Best way to avoid losing it while loose is to simply turn the cap 90 degrees and leave soldered to the board. Then you can measure it and know it won't dissappear into space if you slip with the probes.
Waiting for another video. Awesome. "Forbidden toothbrush" has there been a new development are they banned now?
Great video
I used to get these and just glue a small little fan powered heatsink on them with thermal glue.
That always worked pretty well actually.
Wasn't there a tool to OC the memory as well?
Thanks for watching! The V3 and V4/5 have their memory clock synchronized with the core. So as I increase the clock, both core and memory are overclocked. As far as I know only the Banshee had async core/memory clock control.
Been a viewer for a long while now & love the videos. Seeings as this video is framed in such a lovely shot at the beggining it has jogged my memory on a question ive had forever.
Is that a cherry ML4100? 😂 ive been wondering what keyboard that was for the better part of a year or so.
Thanks very much! 😁 Yep! It’s a cherry ML4100 (exact model number is G84-4100PPAUS). The layout takes some getting used to but perfect for a cramped test bench setup 👍
I wonder if it wouldn't be a good idea to reflow the BGA while it's being worked on? There are a number of DIY BGA rework machines using IR heater beds and PID controllers. A really good one would cost about 200 bucks to build and you could use it on a lot of projects I bet
This is something I hope to gain some experience with at some point. I’ve never done any BGA work yet. Hopefully one day 🙂👍
Great video! You’ve convinced me to cool and overclock my velocity 100!
Thanks! You’ll be surprised at how much headroom you can find with just a small amount of cooling 😄
I think there was some kind of an registry hack to unlock the 2nd TMU on these cards, at least the Velocity 100 cards mit 8 megs. But don't quote me on that.
Yep! Quite easy to unlock the second TMU on the Velocity 100 cards. Thankfully the V3 1000 is fully functional so no registry hack is required 👍
Nice video! Where can I find one MB test base like yours? Don't know what the name may be. Thanks
Thanks! I bought a few of these for really cheap ($20 or so) on Amazon a few years ago. If you search for “ATX test bench” you’ll see very similar benches. They seem to be a bit more expensive today though unfortunately.
@@vswitchzero Thanks!!
Wifejak "I put that toothbrush on your bench back in your sink holder, had no idea why you moved it"
😂
I also have a voodoo 3 1000, and upon digging mine out, it turned out mine is _also_ rocking 5.5ns Siemens chips. Now if I could only get mine working properly
At the time of the tnt2 and gf2 mx that came with dell or hp they didn't have a heatsink, nvidia or manufacturers sold variants on the market too, I recently got a pentium 4 with a Quadro 2 MR agp without a heatsink, I don't know how it survived.
Consider getting a T12-KU or equivalent tip. I use it for 95% of all the work I do (mostly 0603 repair)
Thanks for the suggestion! That looks a lot more appropriate than the T18-K I'm using. I will try to pick one up with my next digikey order.
I had a 3dfx Velocity 100 back in those days. With a small fan added on to the GPU heatsink I was able to OC mine to 155 MHz on the regular. Enabled the 2nd TMU via a registry tweak.
For the relatively small amount I paid for the card then it was a mostly wonderful upgrade from the 3dfx Banshee card, even though it had half as much VRAM as the Banshee. That was the only time I've ever done a video card upgrade and ended up with a faster card that had less VRAM on it!
The velocity 100 was a great value! I still don’t have one in my collection but looking forward to checking one out some day
Maybe in a well aired server case with turbo fans dispenses the use of heatsink...
Silicon magic made 200mhz SGRAM. Part number SM84L512K32.. wonder how hard it would be to get some and try to take the record for fastest Voodoo 3. Around 210-220mhz is the peak that I remember for SDRAM versions with 5.5ns memory back in the day.
What soldering tools do you use? I'm looking to repair a few parts (motherboard, video card) and I'm not quite sure what is good.
I forgot to mention it in the video, but I’ve started including a list of equipment and parts in the video description 👍
I also have the Hakko 888D that vswitchzero is using but it's not very new tech. There are newer styles of irons that heat up faster and work better for reworking components near large ground planes.
@@kunka592 I believe Hakko finally end-of-lifed the 888d actually. Its been a great iron for my purposes but I agree - I'm sure there are much better ones out there by Hakko and other companies too.
Nice job and voodoo :)
Super nervous at you soldering next to the edge connector like that, without covering it with some tape. If you feel confident about it that's fine but it's so easy to get a little bit of solder on there, ruining the gold plating.
Very true, thanks for the tip 👍
Babe! Wake up. New vswitchzero vid just dropped.
Faster memory chips and boost the clock....?
Let's find out.
I bet digikey sent those two caps in a massive box just to add more insanity to ordering 2 smd caps.
2:08 I pulled the trigger on the ultrasonic, absolutely indispensible.
I have my hierarchy. Paint brush for easy dust, soap/water for sensitive components plus contact cleaner, and the ultrasonic for components that have it caked on and corrosion.
Other than the small 20W cleaner for eyeglasses and jewellery from Aldi, ultrasonic the type that can fit even just a Voodoo... is kind of expensive.
@@SianaGearz Yeah, so get one on sale or something, they're worth it. I am looking to buy a second for full ATX boards.
21:00 Linus, a few years ago, did a video about a small US company making their own thermal glue. Since there are no mounting holes and I don't often trust adhesives as I've had heatsinks fall off components that way, I think gluing a small copper heatsink to the core could do wonders for the longevity of the card.
I remember this as well! Yeah I really don’t trust thermal adhesive tape. One major problem is that the v3 chip is slightly concave so it only makes good contact on the edges. It needs extra material in the centre for good contact. Thanks for watching!
That was Tech Ingredients and they have a VERY exciting channel of their own. Explosions, lasers, alcohol, jet engines, you name it, highly recommended.
Honestly the thermal adhesive tape works JUST FINE, the stuff that often comes on the heatsinks preapplied. It's not going anywhere at that size and its thermal properties well they're better than nothing.
Other decent option is the type of silicone used in power supplies, i buy cheap K704 or 705. Its thermal conductivity and adhesion are eerily decent.
I really wouldn't want to epoxy a heatsink on there, i just think it's not very elegant.
Just use the cheap white thermal glue in the corners, and regular thermal compound in the center. I find the cheap stuff sets up more like silicone caulk than an epoxy, so it's easy to remove, so easy that accidently bumping the heatsink is enough sometimes.
Arctic Silver still makes thermal adhesives, but honestly just do it like we do an IHS after a CPU delid. Use regular paste and silicone / automotive emblem adhesive on the edge.
Btw the K705 thermal conductivity is claimed to be 1.6W/mK. It would be scary good if it was that high, i bet it's lower, on the order of half that, but as i said, decent, and it's quite inexpensive. For comparison, while high-performance pastes usually claim to have 5-10W/mK, their real thermal conductivity is usually around 3-4, and white paste is 0.9 W/mK. 15 years ago, AS5 was popular, claiming 4.7, but in reality being 1.0. It is to be said that these figures are probably a bad way to describe the performance of thermal paste, since it characterises the thermal impedance of the bulk material, while most of the real-use thermal impedance occurs at boundaries where it contacts other material, and can't be described with a single number.
Oh i also have another insight, a somewhat unrelated one, if you don't need monstrously high thermal conductivity, and let's face it, the thermal flux off these chips and classic computing stuff in general isn't THAT high, unlike today, cheap white thermal paste lasts much longer than the nicest high-performance pastes. You could open up a random piece of equipment from 20-30 years ago and the white stuff is fresh like day 1. I got myself some HY410 for the purposes and tortured it under extreme temperatures and dumb storage conditions and it looks super promising, it's extremely difficult to induce any breakdown at all, while even the normally considered super trustworthy performance optimised stuff like mx2, mx4 already separates just a little in the tube.
You would love to live in denmark, a broken v3 card is 20$ max, usualy less with the bracket :P well nice video. have a good one.
Thanks very much! .. Haven't seen a single 3dfx item go for anywhere near $20 for a very long time around here. You can't even buy a 3dfx driver CD or a slot bracket on eBay for that these days haha
OMG how. I'd travel to Denmark no problem!
Back in the days when 10Mhz already made difference. Today you need 100's of Mhz extra to get the same experience.
I thought the Voodoo 3 1000 only worked in a Tandy 1000.
1:50 I prefer hair dryer ;p
I pour 100% IPA on it and then datavac (blower fan) all the alcohol out. I still wait a day before using electronics but it's probably not even required.
You copied that floppy didn't you