Welcome to Vogons!
First, I really like your video cards, even if they aren't "best in slot". There is just something special about using legendary legacy.
Second, is there a particular reason that you want a Sound Blaster Live! card? If so, what is that reason? (I'm not challenging your decision, I'm trying to sort out why some people seem to love using Live! and others seem to abhor them.)

I've build a few Tualatin systems in my life (the cpu you have is my personal favorite) but never with a pin modded board (my favorites are the GA-6OXET series and the VIA dual CPU boards). What reason did you have for sticking with that particular board? And was it easy to pin mod it?

I love those huge copper coolers, it just makes the board look fuller, and for lack of better wording, battle ready.

Honestly, I don't seem to recall any significant difference between the Voodoo I and the Voodoo II for compatibility with old DOS games. But I'm not the most educated on that subject so I'll defer to anyone better suited to answer that question.

EDIT: I like that Linux plush too. 😀

Welcome...

Some nice stuff there. A bit overkill on the cooling at the CPU is only 32W!! Doubt the NB needs that kind of cooling unless your in hell or something.... *reads location*

I also run a pin-modded 1.4-S. Great chips indeed. My dicision was based off wanting a black motherboard and the GA-60XET goes for alot more than a ASUS CUSL2-C Black Pearl (actually got 2 ASUS for the price of 1 GA-60XET!!). I like intel's 815 chipset even wtih 512MB limit. Win98SE does great with 512MB!!

As what nemesis said if DOS is your thing maybe a SB AWE 64 Gold! ISA would be better but the live! gives you some DOS emulation and EAX and less CPU usage for late 90's games. ONE MORE THING about the live! If the motherboard does not support NMI you may not get dos drivers working, Like my Gigabyte 694T mobo didn't like it.

As for Glide. There really isn't anything a pair of V2's 12MB in SLI can't handle (well I read about one game for early DOS Glide). Later 3dfx cards are all primary cards which can limit your late games a bit if you need more power.

Lastly get a Large CRT monitor. I can't stand playing low res games on my 19" Dell 5:4 LCD.

Welcome to Vogons! First, I really like your video cards, even if they aren't "best in slot". There is just something special ab […]
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Welcome to Vogons!
First, I really like your video cards, even if they aren't "best in slot". There is just something special about using legendary legacy.
Second, is there a particular reason that you want a Sound Blaster Live! card? If so, what is that reason? (I'm not challenging your decision, I'm trying to sort out why some people seem to love using Live! and others seem to abhor them.)

I've build a few Tualatin systems in my life (the cpu you have is my personal favorite) but never with a pin modded board (my favorites are the GA-6OXET series and the VIA dual CPU boards). What reason did you have for sticking with that particular board? And was it easy to pin mod it?

I love those huge copper coolers, it just makes the board look fuller, and for lack of better wording, battle ready.

Honestly, I don't seem to recall any significant difference between the Voodoo I and the Voodoo II for compatibility with old DOS games. But I'm not the most educated on that subject so I'll defer to anyone better suited to answer that question.

EDIT: I like that Linux plush too. Happy

Thanks for the warm welcome 😀

I like the card aswell , it the first major purchase I made for my computer, with my own money that is, and I still have a lot of fond memories with it, but I want to save it for a special build that I will do later, quite literally going to rebuild my exact system from back then, that got struck by lightning and all that remains is the GFX card, but thats a whole different story...

Well there is three major reasons why I want a Sound Blaster Live!, the biggest being ,full EAX support on newer games, allso the fact that I have a unused and mint Cambridge soundworks 5.1 set setting around doing nothing that was originally bundled with a SB Live,and they really complement each other well,the other is purely due to nostalgia, I allways used creative products, and the Live was my favorite 😀

This is my first Tualatin system, and I must say its a very capable CPU,even if I might not be getting the most out of the system due to the motherboard restraints, it performs remarkably well, and beyond my expectations.

There is no specific reason why I am using this motherboard though,except for the fact that it was the only Pentium 3 board I had on hand,and good ones dont pop up for resell very often here, its not perfect, its very temperamental pnp wise(more than other boards from the time),and you might notice some cosmetic damage on the first memory slot too 😉,but it works allright and will do me till something better comes along.

The Pin mod took me about 30mins to do in total, but I didnt simply cut the pins off, but instead used my soldering iron to heat the pins then de-solder them from the pad below, exposing it and using magnet wire to bridge the pins where needed, I did a SuperPi burn in over 12hours and the system is stable 😀,I dont have any benchmarks to compare it to how they system will perform VS a Tualatin dedicated motherboard, but benchmarks seem 1.5-1.8x faster over the 733mhz P3 Coppermine cpu that was in there before so it seems good. I will attach the diagram I used,its not that difficult.

The GA-6OXET looks like a real beauty, I will try and keep my eyes open for one 😀

On the Voodoo2 I am still not 100% sure aswell, but the topic pops up in several places and most people state that there are several dos glide games it has problems with.

I like the big copper heatsinks aswell, that one was actually by a unknown chinese company and for Athlon xp cpus,it fits well on the P3 though.

Thanks again for your commenting 😀

PS the Pin mod apparently works very well with 440BX boards,still want to try it on one, or a duel 440BX powered motherboard...

RogueTrip2012 wrote:

Welcome... […]
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Welcome...

Some nice stuff there. A bit overkill on the cooling at the CPU is only 32W!! Doubt the NB needs that kind of cooling unless your in hell or something.... *reads location*

I also run a pin-modded 1.4-S. Great chips indeed. My dicision was based off wanting a black motherboard and the GA-60XET goes for alot more than a ASUS CUSL2-C Black Pearl (actually got 2 ASUS for the price of 1 GA-60XET!!). I like intel's 815 chipset even wtih 512MB limit. Win98SE does great with 512MB!!

As what nemesis said if DOS is your thing maybe a SB AWE 64 Gold! ISA would be better but the live! gives you some DOS emulation and EAX and less CPU usage for late 90's games. ONE MORE THING about the live! If the motherboard does not support NMI you may not get dos drivers working, Like my Gigabyte 694T mobo didn't like it.

As for Glide. There really isn't anything a pair of V2's 12MB in SLI can't handle (well I read about one game for early DOS Glide). Later 3dfx cards are all primary cards which can limit your late games a bit if you need more power.

Lastly get a Large CRT monitor. I can't stand playing low res games on my 19" Dell 5:4 LCD.

Your right its way too much overkill for what I need,but it was parts I had laying around unused, the NB on the other hand was running very hot, before I added the cooler, its more of a precautionary thing than anything els.

I will look into if this board support NMi,thanks for the heads up 😀

I wanted to go the V2 Sli rout, but this board is very picky pnp wise,so I really didnt want to take the risk and purchase a pair, only to sit with conflicts later on.

actually I have a 19" CTX CRT 4:3 (1600x1200) but Its on my other desk and it doesnt have enough space for the test rig, but I agree 100% at lower resolution, nothing beats a good CRT 😀

PS I edited the topic instead of double posting (I dont know what the forum rules are here, but lots of places dont like double posting) hope its okay 😀

Welcome to Vogons. I have the very same CPU and a similar board with Apollo Pro 133-T chipset. They work quite nice together, it is my favorite PIII-S chip. I did not have to pin mod it however for it work on my motherboard, just had to get a bios with the correct microcode update.

You can probably save yourself some money and get a PCI voodoo5500, as the voodoo cards did not support AGP fast writes, so they end up performing at the same level as the AGP counterpart.

AFAIK as long as you set the correct environment variables for certain games, Voodoo2 will work the same as Voodoo1.

Just a small update to the project I finally decided on a case initially I wanted to get a white case from the late 1998-2000 for the project but after looking for one I just could find something that I was happy with, and that will match the look of the system, so I decided to go modern:

Cooler master Elite 310 ,simply because the orange reminds me of the later 3DFX logo, and I think it complements the system well 😀

I also found a old thermaltake 80mm fan I purchased years ago, it has a POV Display that displays the ambient temperature 😀,still need to add a blue led back fan and side fan though...

Now this is where the good news stops unfortunately , for the past few weeks Ive been trying to track down a replacement Voodoo 5500 to replace the one I got broken from ebay, and it would seem that most ebay sellers ether don't guarantee or test there cards and the ones that do don't ship internationally,so I am left with this broken card,and I really want to get it working:

So if any one has a working card and they can read the value off of theres I would greatly appreciate it,and be in your dept!!!

Thanks every one for all the help so far 😀

As far as the front caps go, the other large one was a 470uf @16volts if I remember right. The smaller one was the same value as the other small ones surrounding the gpu area. The missing surface mount component off the back, I cant tell you what the value of it was. If no one here knows, you might be able to find a large high res pic of the card via google, and desolder a similar looking one off another part to use. They can usually be carefully removed with a solder iron and tweezers.

Liking the case! Turn that HDD around so you can hide the wires better. I wonder if you could pull the coolermaster logo on the front and replace with the 2nd 3dfx logo 😀

As for the big ones my card shows a 470uf @6volts (10mm size) and then 10uf @ 16volts (4mm).

On the back it is said most are .1uF ceramic 0603 size X7R rating (cited at: http://www.falconfly.de/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1145106063)

On my one AGP card i'm missing 5 caps on the back and it seems to run fine. Numbers missing: C547, C545, C544, C505, C504

EDIT: Appears my sizing was slightly off.

EDIT 2: Looks like ebay item: 150784187242 is matching specs for the back side caps and cheap. I just ordered a set.

FaSMaN wrote:

to share my current project and what will eventually be my main retro PC 😀

Nice project, although not exactly what I would call "retro", it's more like a "demodè" system you're building. 😁

RogueTrip2012 wrote:

Liking the case! Turn that HDD around so you can hide the wires better. I wonder if you could pull the coolermaster logo on the […]
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Liking the case! Turn that HDD around so you can hide the wires better. I wonder if you could pull the coolermaster logo on the front and replace with the 2nd 3dfx logo 😀

As for the big ones my card shows a 470uf @6volts (10mm size) and then 10uf @ 16volts (4mm).

On the back it is said most are .1uF ceramic 0603 size X7R rating (cited at: http://www.falconfly.de/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1145106063)

On my one AGP card i'm missing 5 caps on the back and it seems to run fine. Numbers missing: C547, C545, C544, C505, C504

EDIT: Appears my sizing was slightly off.

EDIT 2: Looks like ebay item: 150784187242 is matching specs for the back side caps and cheap. I just ordered a set.

Thats perfect thank you!!!

I had a look on Ebay that seller doesnt seem to ship to South Africa 🙁, but I did go onto rs.co.za website and they have and they have all the caps I need, immediately placed a order there so within a week or so I should have all the caps I need to start fixing this card 😁

Thanks again RogueTrip2012, I am in your dept!!

PS By looking at your picture it would seem that the 470uf is a low esr cap, I will replace it with the same one 😀

I think its about time I updated this thread, after waiting 4 weeks for RS to order my capacitors, they told me that they have been discontinued, and arent made any more in that size/formfactor any more 😒

So I had to go for "similar ones" while not ideal it should work 100%, so what I went with is:

1x NIC 6.3V 470uf, Ultra low ESR Aluminum (its a bit taller bit a lot thinner than the original cap that goes onto the V5)
1x (No-Name) 25V 10uf, Low impudence Radial (Closes to low ESR they had)
1x 1uf surface mount, ceramic

The above is 100% but doesnt look as good on the board:

Initially I thought it was working fine but after several days of use I noticed this card is far from perfect with 3 main problems:

Sprites goes missing at random
If you exit a game you get black lines across the screen
Random freezes and reboots in 3d games

The caps seem fine, because I get the same results if I swap them out with normal Radial caps I had. Changing drivers and system configuration doesn't seem to improve things, and it seems to be doing the exact same thing in my AMD Athlon 3400+ 939 rig aswell 😒

I have given up on it, it was clearly abused and sat in a bin for a very long time, its probably static damage or something els.

PS Will post some more pictures of the system as soon as I can 😀,the next update shouldnt take too long as I am no longer waiting for things.

It could be a cold solder joint. You may need to bake the thing for a few mins. Since its the AGP version of the card, did you mod the card to work on the 939?

Well sounds like it is almost working good. Have you cleaned the contacts off? I use a shop rag and some turtle chrome polish to clean my contacts. You'll see the left over residue is black until the contacts start to clean up so I start new areas of the rag until it cleans up.

Other things I can think of trying is using a large fan to keep the card cooler and see if that helps and using Reference drivers. I dunno how much grief I've had over 3rd party drivers.

Nice work and great case, as for the v5 you didn't have to find the exact rating when it came to replacement caps. They only had to be the same voltage but most boards tolerate much higher rated caps just fine but smd caps are different. As for the v1 well I got lucky on amazon a few days ago. Landed a diamond monster 3d with pass through cable for $14.40 after ship.

welcome to the forums. that is a nice p3t build. i don't like creative much but it is often a necessity in order to get eax comp. you might want to look into an aureal soundcard, they were the direct competitor of SB in that era. much better 3d sound where it was supported.

ProfessorProfessorson wrote:

It could be a cold solder joint. You may need to bake the thing for a few mins. Since its the AGP version of the card, did you mod the card to work on the 939?

I dont really want to go that extreme, but I will look and see if I can find some one with a infra red rework station and do a reflow there , the oven method has allways scared me 😒

Your right I was a bit mistaken I didnt test it in my 939 rig as that was only agp 4x/8x I used a P4 2.4ghz motherboard I had laying about...

RogueTrip2012 wrote:

Well sounds like it is almost working good. Have you cleaned the contacts off? I use a shop rag and some turtle chrome polish to clean my contacts. You'll see the left over residue is black until the contacts start to clean up so I start new areas of the rag until it cleans up.

Other things I can think of trying is using a large fan to keep the card cooler and see if that helps and using Reference drivers. I dunno how much grief I've had over 3rd party drivers.

I use alcohol and a Q-Tip/Earbud to clean the connection on every card I get 😀

Running last official beta didnt help, it was my first choice as its a bit more compatible with Glide2x 😀, if I read correctly.

nforce4max wrote:

Nice work and great case, as for the v5 you didn't have to find the exact rating when it came to replacement caps. They only had to be the same voltage but most boards tolerate much higher rated caps just fine but smd caps are different. As for the v1 well I got lucky on amazon a few days ago. Landed a diamond monster 3d with pass through cable for $14.40 after ship.

Thank you, thats a really good deal, I presume it was trough a 3rd party seller on amazon, they normally dont ship here 🙁

sepultribe wrote:

welcome to the forums. that is a nice p3t build. i don't like creative much but it is often a necessity in order to get eax comp. you might want to look into an aureal soundcard, they were the direct competitor of SB in that era. much better 3d sound where it was supported.

I remember aureal sound cards, I really wanted to get a Diamond Monster sound mx300 back in the day, I remember it had rave reviews in the PC format, I kindoff forgot about it, I will look into it and see if I can find one locally 😀

Thanks you 😀