32mb voodoo3 ???

[mastarecoil]

I have a voodoo3 2000 pci that I use as a secondary video card. It looks diffrent then my friends v3 2000 pci though, it has 2x the solder pads as there are memory chips. Could this have been a design for a 32mb version as well? The board also has a diffrent layout then the other voodoo3. My voodoo3 is newer then my friends too, so mabey this was a new version that they though of a 32mb version. Anyone have any idea whats up with this.

Thanks
Garrett.

 

[hatboy]

I also have a Voodoo3 that has twice as many solder pads as there are memory chips. The reason for this is that it uses SGRAM instead of the SDRAM used on older Voodoo3s. The extra pads are for the SDRAM version, which has twice as many chips, but still only 16mb of memory. I'm really not sure why 3dfx switched to SGRAM, but it does offer a slight performance boost over SDRAM. As far as I know, there never was a 32mb Voodoo3, and there almost certainly never will be.

 

[mastarecoil]

Still is there any way to add ram to use unused pads?

Thanks
Garrett.

 

[hatboy]

I really doubt it would be possible. First of all, you'd have to be really, REALLY good at soldering. Even if you could find the proper ram and correctly solder it onto the card, I'm not certain that the Voodoo3 chip can support more than 16mb of ram. Even if it did, it's really unlikely that the card's bios would support it. I don't think trying to add ram would be worth the effort.