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(Image credit: Bits und Bolts Youtube ) The 3Dfx Voodoo 2 and the Nvidia Riva TNT were the pinnacles of the early era of 3D graphics. Both were released in 1998, and while I owned the latter, the Voodoo 2 was the faster of the two, despite the inconvenience of requiring an existing 2D graphics card. The Voodoo 2 is naturally memorable, and it's a regular presence in retro PC builds. As the YouTube channel Bits und Bolts (Bits) found out , the cards' capacitors can and will fail in time due to the rarely discussed pyroelectric effect.
In a lengthy video, Bits diagnoses why one of his Voodoo 2 cards is intermittently failing with graphical corruption, with no apparent pattern other than the issues appearing after a short time of use. After much digging, he figures out that the problem seems related to the card's power-delivery circuitry by inspecting how resistance changed at the component that converts 5 V to 3.3 V.
Watch On That led him on to figuring out that one or more of the capacitors in the power circuitry was a bit off. The parts in question are the small rectangular capacitors that you see scattered by the hundreds in any modern PCB, and they are usually a pain in the neck to diagnose. After a quick inspection with a thermal camera, Bits spotted a few that lit up and replaced them.
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Unfortunately, they were not the only ones, and having to measure the circuit and each potential (pun intended) capacitor got old really quickly. So, after some research, he came up with a much faster method: point a heat gun at each capacitor along the path and see how the circuit reacts.
This method arose from the pyroelectric effect, a property of materials that causes their electrical properties to change as they heat up and cool down. Broadly speaking, a component within spec will have limited to no reaction, but capacitors do age. In the case of the Voodoo 2, they'll result in intermittent, hard-to-reproduce failures.
Bits goes on to point out that if you own a Voodoo 2 card, it's a good idea to do some preventive maintenance on it and replace capacitors along the power circuitry beforehand to avoid hours of diagnostics later — it's not a matter of if the capacitors will fail, simply when. It can be argued that this could also be done for most vintage electronics.
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- https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/vintage-3dfx-voodoo-2-cards-may-inevitably-fail-due-to-pyroelectric-capacitors-retrocomputing-channel-investigates-and-recommends-preventive-maintenance#main
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