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 :)

Definitely make it a 3000, as far as I remember it was essentially a 'free' upgrade for all 2000 cards.

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).

🤔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 have to admire this level of effort put into restoring a 25 year old video card

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.

I've seen this exact fault with flash ROMs, Basically, the ROM has "weak bits" that can usually be read after a few passes or when warmed up, but can have a form of Flash Memory Amnesia as I coin it. I had this issue on the old Wincor Nixdorf SNIkey display-keyboard systems where the key-table ROMs would read fine in a reader, or sometimes with random verify issues, but wouldn't work unless "refreshed" (Reflashing the already stored ROM, or replacing the ROM). These reflashes lasted on average 6 to 11 months at a time (Good for us as warranty was only 3 months for E-POS repair).

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!

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.

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.

The self-bricking voodoos kinda reminds me of the self-bricking Wii Us. Except like 15 years apart.

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.

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.

Overclocked my Voodoo3 2000 from 143 to 166MHz without problems back then. Very common tweak back then.

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.

Probably best to replace all of those electrolytic capacitors since you're already working on one

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

When I saw "I see nothing!" in the thumbnail, I immediately thought of Sgt. Schultz haha!

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.

Awesome!

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 😁

Did you notice the "new" ROM images were 64K and the one on the chip was only 32K?

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'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.

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.

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?

It's interesting that while the downloaded BIOS is 64 KiB in size, SAVE.ROM is only 32 KiB.

There is something hilarious about the phrase blinking crazy screen in that magnificent accent!

Another great repair. I would like to know the physical differences between a 2000 and a 3000. Is it just the bios?

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.

I dont own a 3dfx card but this might make me want to pick one up haha

Its a clock pointer issue, akin to a Y2K bug. Planned obsolescence. Your bios reset fixed your broken clock pointer.

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'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?

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 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

We never installed one, but back when i,was little we had one

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.

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.

My Voodoo3 2000 used to overclock upto about 150-155 but i think my memory was 7ns

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.

Great, another working card. What is the difference between Voodoo 3 2000 and 3000?

i love your accent, i dont even like old pieces of tech that much, i prefer the crazy flashing bios btw.

I wonder if this card is able to run two vga-ports?

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.)

So why did the bios need reflashing. Wrong bios flash? Info lost from not being powered on for a long time? WHY!!!!

yes flash it for the 3000

Its because flash memory wont hold its data after about 10 years right? Seems they have done well to last 20 years or more!

i have a evilking 3 ( Voodoo 3 ) same no video no idea why

Flash it already!

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 3000 was godlike. Being able to play half life on a pentium 200 mmx 🤤

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.

I had to reflash my 56k modem at least three times. I guess flash from back then just sucked.

What's the song at 5:50?

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.

flashing it dusted off some cobwebs then it worked.

Meybe some voodoo magic also needed to fix this Voodoo 3

Oh you mean other than being nearly 30 years old?

"Product of Mexico" There's your answer.

vor 3 weeks i see the Exakt Problem and Soluten with a Geforce RTX 2080 😂

1:08 cap missing, strangely you glossed over it

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.