Vintage 3dfx Voodoo 2 cards may inevitably fail due to pyroelectric capacitors — retrocomputing channel investigates and recommends preventive maintenance
www.tomshardware.com
It's not a matter of if; rather when.

Original YT Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4oZlt9Dl43I

The 3Dfx Voodoo 2 and the Nvidia Riva TNT were the pinnacles of the early era of 3D graphics. Both were released in 1998, and while I owned the latter, the Voodoo 2 was the faster of the two, despite the inconvenience of requiring an existing 2D graphics card. The Voodoo 2 is naturally memorable, and it’s a regular presence in retro PC builds. As the YouTube channel Bits und Bolts (Bits) found out, the cards’ capacitors can and will fail in time due to the rarely discussed pyroelectric effect.

In a lengthy video, Bits diagnoses why one of his Voodoo 2 cards is intermittently failing with graphical corruption, with no apparent pattern other than the issues appearing after a short time of use. After much digging, he figures out that the problem seems related to the card’s power-delivery circuitry by inspecting how resistance changed at the component that converts 5 V to 3.3 V.

    • bus_factor@lemmy.world
      4·
      16 hours ago

      Someone I knew had two 12MB Voodoo2 cards in SLI. I couldn’t believe anyone could shell out that much. My build was a single 8MB Voodoo2, which was already mind-blowing, especially since I never had 3D acceleration before that.