3dfx Voodoo 5 6000

GiGaBiTe said:
The OEM 3dfx fans with AAVID stickers are ball bearing fans, oiling them won't help because the bearings are failing. You might be able to knock out the bearings and replace them if you could find bearings that small.



Those fans are unobtanium.

While you can find 40mm fans, getting them with Mini JST headers and with the slim profile of the original AAVID brand fans is nearly impossible. The AAVID fans are 5-8mm thick and have wide and shallow mounting holes. Modern 40mm fans are going to be 10-15mm thick at minimum and have deep thin mounting holes which prevents them from mounting to the original heatsink.

When the fans on my Voodoo5 5500 failed, I had to do a lot of research and experimentation to get replacements to work. I ended up buying 3 wire fans and replacing the standard 3 pin fan connector with a 3 pin Mini JST pigtail, with I think a 2mm pin pitch. The mounting holes didn't line up so I removed the stock heatsinks and replaced them with much larger versions. The fans still don't fit quite right, but they work and the VSA-100 chips don't overheat.

Getting 3 wire fans is important because at least on my card, it won't power up unless it detects the fans are spinning.
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I dont know the p/n on the oem ones but there are lots of fans that should be very close and then just transplant the oem jst jack. its doable.
 
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now i just need a FSP300 or 400 and also a PATA IDE HDD to continue
 
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If the fans do use barings. Place the card on it's back on a flat price of cardboard and press in on the fans 5-6 times letting them spring back out. That should realine the barrings.
 
started the build ...

GLrFT9WE_Gl_IUqQwyYWGu2VqwcZn5CNSLBzyjp_SmfKMde-IMuRgEvYPEl5pJunzGvvucnw&_nc_ht=scontent.fagc1-1.jpg
 
pendragon1 said:
I dont know the p/n on the oem ones but there are lots of fans that should be very close and then just transplant the oem jst jack. its doable.
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Slim 40mm fans are hard to find, that being said, I finally found one for sale on Newegg:

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835119048

eclypse said:
If the fans do use barings. Place the card on it's back on a flat price of cardboard and press in on the fans 5-6 times letting them spring back out. That should realine the barrings.
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Fans have sealed bearings in a bore, they're not split race types that have the balls crunched between them. You can move the fan spindle back and forth all you want, it won't do anything. The resistance you feel is the magnetic field holding the hub in place. When the bearings start making noise, they're trashed and need to be replaced.
 
Running some Q3 on that bad boy. Cool deal. Now you need a real game - UT.

Switching between nforce2 and Voodoo4 in exact same system. I could swear the colors pop more in Glide.
 
Susquehannock said:
Running some Q3 on that bad boy. Cool deal. Now you need a real game - UT.

Switching between nforce2 and Voodoo4 in exact same system. I could swear the colors pop more in Glide.
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Did you see the UT99 Online gameplay? it's in the video
 
^^ that would sell well if you ever decided to go that route. Values are still rising. This one missing fans and heat sinks is up to $185 so far.
 
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Susquehannock said:
^^ that would sell well if you ever decided to go that route. Values are still rising. This one missing fans and heat sinks is up to $185 so far.
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Surprising they're still selling decently well, after 3dfx went bust they were fetching good money but that was 18 years ago now.
 
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Chris_B said:
Surprising they're still selling decently well, after 3dfx went bust they were fetching good money but that was 18 years ago now.
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High demand for retro hardware now. Seems everyone wants to build an AGP era gaming system to relive their youth. 3dfx is at top of the heap. Interestingly, selling price of Voodoo4 have really skyrocketed in the last few months. By well over 100%. Probably because supply and price of Voodoo5 are getting out of reach.
 
Susquehannock said:
High demand for retro hardware now. Seems everyone wants to build an AGP era gaming system to relive their youth. 3dfx is at top of the heap. Interestingly, selling price of Voodoo4 have really skyrocketed in the last few months. By well over 100%. Probably because supply and price of Voodoo5 are getting out of reach.
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Not to mention the voodoo 5 range really didn't get a proper launch, only 2 of the 4 cards made it to market, the voodoo 5 5000 had 32mb of ram (16mb effective) and was scrapped before launch, the 6000 just seemed to be a pipe dream halo product that only had a few hundred built at the most. Also all the issues they had with the intel bridge chip before finally changing to a hint chip.

Thanks to the higher ups at 3dfx the company got sunk, basically every product after voodoo 2 was a stopgap filler product as they kept diverting resources away from rampage which fell further and further behind. I think at one point it was so far behind it eventually got redesigned to incorporate the t&l sage chip. :(

Would have been nice to have 3 players these days and with intel coming into the game to make a fourth it would have made for some interesting times.
 
This is an awesome thread, really enjoying watching your progress! I spend far more time gaming on my 3dfx retro system then I do playing modern games (hence the pathetic GPU in my daily driver lol). Been enjoying a nice replay of System Shock 2. :smuggrin:

P5280011.jpg
 
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Chris_B said:
Would have been nice to have 3 players these days and with intel coming into the game to make a fourth it would have made for some interesting times.
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Yes, it would be nice to have a 3rd player in the market, but it will never happen. The first hurdle is getting the investment to form a company and hire the engineers with experience designing video chips, which is a tall order in and of itself. The next would be getting a clean room design drafted that's tested and proven to work. By this time, it'll likely be a few years down the road and you're likely going to have Nvidia, AMD and probably Intel getting up in your business trying to figure out what you're doing. Assuming you can keep them confused long enough to get a chip taped out, they'll probably figure it out and start crushing you with patent lawsuits, since they basically hold all of the GPU related patents worldwide.

To be in the GPU game, you would have had to start 20-25 years ago when the 3D acceleration market was getting started. The only way I could see a 3rd player now is if you could rework a mobile chip like PowerVR into a discrete product, or buy an existing shelved design like the VIA Chrome series and drastically improve it to compete with modern hardware on some level.

Susquehannock said:
^^ that would sell well if you ever decided to go that route. Values are still rising. This one missing fans and heat sinks is up to $185 so far.
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Mine is equally ridiculous:

CP58Nmdh.jpg


Oversized heatsinks, wrong fans, wrong screws, radial caps in place of old dead SMD caps.
 
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GiGaBiTe said:
Yes, it would be nice to have a 3rd player in the market, but it will never happen. The first hurdle is getting the investment to form a company and hire the engineers with experience designing video chips, which is a tall order in and of itself. The next would be getting a clean room design drafted that's tested and proven to work. By this time, it'll likely be a few years down the road and you're likely going to have Nvidia, AMD and probably Intel getting up in your business trying to figure out what you're doing. Assuming you can keep them confused long enough to get a chip taped out, they'll probably figure it out and start crushing you with patent lawsuits, since they basically hold all of the GPU related patents worldwide.

To be in the GPU game, you would have had to start 20-25 years ago when the 3D acceleration market was getting started. The only way I could see a 3rd player now is if you could rework a mobile chip like PowerVR into a discrete product, or buy an existing shelved design like the VIA Chrome series and drastically improve it to compete with modern hardware on some level.



Mine is equally ridiculous:

View attachment 117612

Oversized heatsinks, wrong fans, wrong screws, radial caps in place of old dead SMD caps.
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But she works right ;)

Edit: had no idea one could put regular caps on it.. can I get the cap values just encase?

Should post a pic of mine with different copper heat sinks and copper heat sinks on all memory. Sexied it up as well I think.. should be worth more ;)
 
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Chris_B said:
Edit: had no idea one could put regular caps on it.. can I get the cap values just encase?
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It's not terribly difficult. Just take a radial cap and measure the legs about 1/4" from the body and bend the legs 90 degrees outwards. Then snip all but about 1/8" of the legs off to leave the leads looking like small Ls back to back, this will make them easier to solder to the SMD pads. Remove the old SMD caps (I prefer the twist off method) and tin the pads with enough solder to leave a small half blob. Then take the prepped capacitor and hold it over the two blobbed pads and heat them up with the soldering iron to sink the leads down into the blobs. Once you get the leads in, you can go back and alternate pads with new solder to make sure they're submerged in solder.

Here are the cap values I used:

kMg6Lqkh.jpg


I used 50v caps because that's what I had lying around. The original caps were 16v, here's a high res shot of another card which shows the values:

http://tdfx.de/pic/voodoo5_agp_01b.JPG
 
Erek you never cease to amaze me. Really glad to have another retro enthusiast here. kudos to making the front page.
 
Time to fire up Diablo II. I know some games from that era had special 3dfx settings. Don't remember if D2 was one of them.
 
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Takes me back seeing that boot screen, and good to see such old tech still working.
 
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erek said:
now i just need a FSP300 or 400 and also a PATA IDE HDD to continue
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I don't know how well they work, but there are converters so you can use a SATA drive on an IDE port; and compact flash to IDE is just pin mapping. Either option seems like a better idea than hoping 10+ year old drives keep going. Depends on how historically accurate you want though, I guess.

Dead Parrot said:
Time to fire up Diablo II. I know some games from that era had special 3dfx settings. Don't remember if D2 was one of them.
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I'm pretty sure Diablo II had a 3dfx mode, although it was later available with most cards, and IIRC I liked the standard mode better (but that might just be me).
 
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still have my 3dfx voodoo 5 5500 sitting in a working win 98SE system in my storage room
forget what motherboard its on ..but its an intel chip in it and chipset may be 440 BX ? (CPU = p3 933 slot 1 may be my p 3 600 slot 1 CPU right now ..i think i got that as a pull and wanted to try to test the CPU..and never put the p 3 933 back in ..still have the P3 933 chip in a static bag )
512 meg of SD ram
creative labs SB AWE 32 ISA card (yea the big long one with 2 meg upgrade both slots installed )
woppoin whole 400 watt antec true power PSU with a billion wires :LOL
with 2 western digital 8 gig hard drives (not in raid ) and a iomega zip drive and a 24 X cd rom

wonder what its worth these days :lol
 
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Not to advertise for anyone, but Capacitors for these cards and for motherboards can be found in almost any form factor on DigiKey.com.

Look for 105°C rated, high frequency caps, NOT general purpose.

You can search by package size.

BTW, Aluminum Electrolytic capacitors Don't swap for SMT caps, typically; the inductance values are too high, so check the numbers.

I typically look for ones rated for 10,000 or 20,000 hours, so I don't have to do it again.

EDIT: I found out recently repairing my monitors that Aluminum Electrolytic capacitors DONT Work for 2.5V or 1.8V rails; there's not enough voltage to keep them 'formed'.
 
{NG}Fidel said:
Erek you never cease to amaze me. Really glad to have another retro enthusiast here. kudos to making the front page.
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Thank you, and to everyone in this thread for supporting making this happen!

My hands were shaking during the first power on!

Mainly due to this: "the HiNT bridge which is the biggest death cause for the Voodoo 5 6000 cards in the world. On some motherboards this chip can be destroyed by a short-circuit during the boot process and this kills the whole card."



http://www.x86-secret.com/articles/divers/v5-6000/v56kgb-6.htm
 
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