Major trouble with Voodoo 5 card...anyone please help...

[Wolfchild]

Hi. I purchased a used Voodoo 5 5500 AGP to replace the Voodoo 3 I was using and installed it yesterday. This card ran okay for me for about one hour (and this is weird because it worked just fine) and then starting showing graphics glitches and now it won't run for five minutes without locking my machine up. I deleted my old Win 2K Voodoo 3 drivers and 3dfx Tools from Add/Remove programs before I installed this. Was that not enough? I've tried both the newest Win 2K Voodoo 5 drivers as well as the prior release. I assume I might have some kind of driver problem, as I'm able to run with a 16 color VGA driver without it locking the computer up.

I'm using what should be the best drivers from 3dfx so I don't know what else I can do.

The only other thing I can think of is, I have an Asus A7V133 motherboard. Would the Via 4-in-1 drivers have anything to do with this? I have them installed but would I need to install them again over the Voodoo 5 drivers? The biggest problem at this point, it's hard to do much of anything with the drivers installed. This is a system that runs 24/7 and is completely stable, and it now crashes usually within a couple minutes of starting, sometimes the system won't even finish loading. Well, it's running okay right now in horrible 16 color mode.

Any help is greatly appreciated...

Asus A7V133
T Bird 1333
512 MB SDRAM
Voodoo 5 5500 64 meg AGP
Windows 2000 with SP1

Nothing is OCed.

 

[skew]

Try using the drivers on the windows update site. These seemed to work the best for me when I had my 5500 If that do work then you still have left over v3 stuff somewhere. The add/remove doesn't get them all sometimes,

 

[Slapstick]

I hate to say this but the card may be going bad. It sounds more like a one of the chips is overheating in 3D apps, (2D doesn?t put a lot of stress on the VSA 100 chips so they don?t overheat and the generic VGA drivers don?t take advantage of any of the 3D accelerated portions of the chip). I would check to see that both fans are running on the card and your getting good airflow through the case in case it?s just an overheating problem.

Just thought of something else to check, make sure the power connector is firmly in place. I had some problems with my V5. Everything was fine for almost a year then it started locking up, not coming out of standby, not initializing on boot. Changed the power connector to different one off the PS and everything was back to normal.

 

[Wolfchild]

Slapstick...think you're right. It completely fits in with my symptoms. Put my V3 3K back in and everything runs fine. Both fans are running fine, the card doesn't actually seem to be overheating but as soon as you put it to work it crashes, and even when it's only just warm, graphics anomalies are all over the place. Most of the time the system won't even load once the card is warm.

Didn't even get a chance to see what Quake 3 looks like with this baby...crashes instantly

 

[HappyGamer2]

try under clocking the v5 card, or run it in single chip mode. also put a small house fan blowing into the case with cover off to see if heat really is the problem.
how big is your systems power supply?

also try the V5 in a different pc to see if it's really dead

 

[Wolfchild]

I have a 400W TBird-approved PS.

Thanks for the suggestion, but don't you think the card should work as it is intended? Having to turn it down isn't a solution IMO. This PC has a good cooling solution, no real heat problems. The card is by no means completely dead but it is also not functional as intended. It is also not apparently doing any real overheating.

The symptoms remind me quite a bit of my first Dolby Digital HT receiver...it would work all day long in DTS or Pro-Logic mode, but as soon as you tried a Dolby Digital soundtrack it took a crap...whatever did the DD decoding was dead...this thing is the same way even though different equipment....as soon as you try to raise the res above 640x480 and do any modern desktop work it takes a dump....put the old (and I may say very hot-running) video card back in and everything is 100% stable again.