V5 5500 HS removal

[gamefoo21]

Is It worth while pulling the sinks off of a V5 and putting heavier ones on with bigger 40mm fans or is it a waste of my time?

One fan is dead that why I am curious about ripping it apart and stickin new sinks on instead of just fans.

[Fuzzbeaner]

Use the freezer method my friend

1. Place your beloved videocard in a zip lock bag.
2. Place the bag and card into your freezer
3. Put on some eye protection, flying heatsinks are great blindness tools.
4. Using a screwdriver for prying, pliers for pulling, or a hammer for angry shattering, remove the heatsinks.
5. Using thermal expoxy toss on some sinks!

There you go, around an hour of work for an easy, fun, and prideful mod!

And YES it's worth it, it's a 3dfx card darn it, and if you don't think it is, donate it to me for the 3dfx computer I would build if only I had a Voodoo 5. ;)

-Jeff

P.S. Don't really use the hammer unless you want a plethora of card-shards to adorn your floor.

[gamefoo21]

Thanks for the Info :). I have it freezing right now.

Any idea how high your typical V5 5500 will go?

AHH the greatness of anodized aluminum here I come. I need to find my lapping kit :). Those stock coolers will make awesome ram sinks for it.

[Fuzzbeaner]

Unfortunately, I'm not really sure of the OCing potentiall of the 5500, but I know my Voodoo 3 (Back before I killed it in a tragic accident where it met my floor face to face) went a solid 30% over default. Using the newest 3rd party drivers, and OC, it ran Tribes 2 and NSF 5: Porshe Unleashed in stunning beauty with very acceptable framerates. :drool:

Of course, like OCing an SMP system, you can only push it as far as one of the chips will go....but you gotta believe!

Good luck, it's a helluva card!

-Jeff

[gamefoo21]

I'm looking at the cooling on here and it seems this is just fancied up passive cooling, LOW cfm fans on near useless HS's means 3dfx crippled this card when it came to clockspeed. I was looking at different images of these cards and it seems mine is a newer model just looking at the numbers on the ram chips.

Also a 30% overclock would be running this card at 216 instead of the stock 166.

Also do you know what the stock clock of the ram is? Also is this DDR or late model SDR? It doesn't seem right to equip a pretty 128bit card that seems to be using a 128bit mem bus to SDR...

Also I've started my hunt for 4 stock coolers or 2 stock hs's. So I can equip this card with active ram coolers. If i can't get 4 matching hsf's I will try for 4 matching low profile 40 mm's and ghetto wire the thing. I'm going to call it the Black Adder. If you like British comedy you'll get the funny part of why I'm calling the card mod this.

Zac

[Fuzzbeaner]

Did you have gold HSFs instead of the normal short black ones? If you did, you have a newer revision chip that's very rare - VSA -101...I think. Of course, that's terribly unlikely, if not impossible.

As for ram, yes it is SDR, much to the dissapointment of everyone.

I do watch Black Adder, but it's 7 in the morning, so I don't yet get it. Maybe later today I will.

Good luck on your search! If you really want to impress everyone I've always wanted to see someone toss dual Socket A coolers on a V5 5500.......;)

-Jeff

[gamefoo21]

I am going to the shop to order in the twin to the socket A/370 cooler that they have shaped something like \_/ so i can squeeze the active ram coolers onto it.

I thought the VSA-101's were used on the v5 6000 which is supposed to be the super card of the dx7 generation.

anyways here is whats written on my chips:

F25109.1 AS
0025 20005
TAIWAN 1z01

I think a nice 200/200 will be doable. :)

Zac

[rashly]

200 will not be doable. you need water to get there, and even that wouldnt guarnatee it.

the core is not the overclocking bottleneck. its the ram. the ram doesnt even get hot, so cooling wont do much for it, its just crappy high latency ram that cant go too high.

the stock hsf on the v5 is actually a decent cooler, just the thermal paste they used sucked.

solution:
reattach the stock hsf with as3. put small ramsinks on the ram. put a thick peice of non conductive thermal tape on the back of each vsa100 on the 1cmx1cm square in between resistors. then put a new hsf on each one of these tapes. the back of the vsas get really hot, so this will help cooling alot.

[felinusz]

I did a Voodoo 5 overclock a while back - you can see the pictures in the card modding gallery on the third page.

I overclocked it to 186/186 stable - but 3DMark01 scored lower at those speeds then @ stock. 180/180 was the highest I could get it to go stably, and with performance gains. The core and RAM on this card are synced, and for some reason you cannot scale them seperately - only together. As such this card is a pretty bad overclocker due to the crummy RAM 3DFX used on it.

Who knows how high the core could go with decent cooling *if* you could scale it seperately - I'll be willing to bet that it would top out at around 210ish.

The Mac sauce that 3DFX used as thermal epoxy is the worst cooling soloution on a stock video card I have ever seen before - 3DFX crippled the card with this cooling, and with the dirt awful memory. In hindsight this card wasn't that good, and 3DFX made a mistake releasing it the way that they did.