Experiencing graphical glitches with Orchid Righteous Voodoo 3dfx. Fault can be fixed?
Posted by HurtMePlentyM8@reddit | retrobattlestations | View on Reddit | 5 comments
So I picked up an Orchid Righteous Voodoo card on fleaBay advertised as used but working. Once all set up with the driver, this what I'm seeing:
Now, I don't recall installing the psychedelic mod in Quake II so inspected the board and found that in the corner. Is there hope for a repair?
Also worth mentioning that I've tried a couple of the 3dfx tech demos and got similar results with both the Orchid and latest reference drivers.
Any advice would on this would be much appreciated. Thanks.
Alarchy@reddit
The effect appears to be memory corruption, and the burnt out resistor by the ram chip is probably an indicator it suffered overvoltage/current at some point. The resistor being replaced may help (poor power = memory corruption) but at least one RAM chip may be damaged and need to be replaced too
ThatRandomGuy0125@reddit
I think they're not resistors, but capacitors. They're labeled C58 and C61, and look like small SMD ceramic capacitors. Capacitors are pretty notorious for failing with age (iirc older Macs are notorious for this with how many big electrolytic capacitors they use), so if OP cleans these caps up, and replaces them with new equivalent ones, it's possible the card would work fine again.
Alarchy@reddit
Ah yeah, good call on cap vs. resistor. And good luck soldering those tiny suckers 😆
canthearu_ack@reddit
Low hanging fruit repair maybe:
I would clean that area in the corner, remove C6, then reflow all the pins on that memory chip next to it, then see if that corrects things. The card can probably survive and work fine with C6, it would be a power filter capacitor and there is lots of redundancy for that all over the board.
If the corruption goes away, I'd find a replacement for C6 and install it just to make myself sleep better at night.
Definitely a memory issue, so starting in that corner with obvious corrosion would be the first thing to do before having to really switch the brain on.
DominBear@reddit
trippy. you need rto cleanup this corrosuion an replace bad components. if it persists probably also the ram chip.