OC'ing Voodoo3 2000

[Amorpheous]

Ihave heard reports of people overclocking their voodoo3 2000 pci with no active cooling such as a fan, because the heatsink is good enough? though, i oc mine to 153 from a base speed of 143, and it locks the whole system up after about 10 min of a 3d intensive game. I have 6 fans altogether in the case, one in the bottom front, blowing riht over the cpu fan/hs, and a Nidec Beta SL(old fan but has mad airflow!!) pulling exhaust right above the vid card, created a nice jet stream flow for ventilation. plus the PS fan, and another small intake fan feeding cool air at the bottom rear of case. plus the case has ventilation in the side panels. any suggestions?

[RobRich]

You might just not have an o/c friendly board. It could be that your core is maxing out, or that the memory on your card is rated for a slow speed. I would try directly cooling it before giving up though. You should be able to directly attach a 486 fan to the core for decent cooling. I haven't ever tried it with a v3 2000, but you can also replace the small factory heatsink with a socket7 hs/fan combo. Other's here should be able to supply detailed information on that.

[Amorpheous]

Robrich, I did attach a 486 fan from radio shack, that didnt help much. still locked up at 153 mhz. the voodoo3 3000 is the same as 2000, just higher memory clock speed ... 160 mhz i think...well ill keep trying maybe a nidec gamma 28 i have sitting around will take care of it if i can just figure out how to mount it in my case...

[AnakiMana]

If you decide it's worth it, remove the heatsink from the card and replace the thermal tape with thermal compound. Also, you can strap a fan to it with tie-wraps or twist-ties (or whatever they're called!). You should be able to clock it up a bit then. If you try it, please post the results! One of the good overclocking sites did a review on the VooDoo3 series and tested the overclockability of each one! Sorry I can't remember the location... http://www.sysopt.com/forum/frown.gif

Hope this helps.
AnakiMana

[AnakiMana]

VooDoo3 2000 = 143mhz, 286 megatexels
VooDoo3 3000 = 166mhz, 333 megatexels
VooDoo3 3500 = 183mhz, 366 megatexels

I've got a 3000 running at 175mhz, but haven't tried any higher yet. I still have the thermal tape but I'm running a 486 fan on it. The only fans in my case are cheap processor fans on my K6-2 and VooDoo3. So I won't push it too far.

AnakiMana

[PrimalX]

I've reached 175Mhz without any cooling what so ever... but it's so hot.. so I took off the hs and stuck a bigger hs + fan + paste in.. and now I am at 180Mhz - stable as a rock!

@183Mhz I would see some artifacts, so went back to 180.

Bench mark using 3Dmark2000 - fillrate
@ 143Mhz:
single pass = 126.2 Mtexel/s
double pass = 244.6 Mtexel/s

@ 180Mhz:
single pass = 159.9 Mtexel/s
double pass = 310.7 Mtexel/s

[alpha]

V3s are **** hot, cooling might be your problem. You might just have slow memory though.

[Amorpheous]

Should i mount the 486 fan so it is blowing on the heatsink or pulling air away from the heatsink?

[alpha]

Blowing on the sink

[thekingofpain]

V3 3000-- 2 fans (1 front, one backside) + heatsink on chip = 196 for me... (using Gary Petersons VOODOO overclocker)

[Amorpheous]

Alpha, i had the fan blowing on the sink the first time, didn't seem to do much. someone suggested having it pulling air away. i guess ill take the heatsink off and slap some thermal paste in between there too...

[CIPHER1]

I have a V3 2000 PCI with a global win FAC08
attatched on top of the processor and the stock heatsink on the bottom sandwiched. With out cooling the V3 gets very hot. I would advise getting another heatsink for it and then you can overclock the hell out of it.

[CIPHER1]

Oh yeah and my V3 is OCed to 170 for now.