3dfx Voodoo 3 3000 + Noctua NF-A4x10 fan = overclocking

Or at least, it’ll run a little cooler and hopefully add a few more years to the old girls life.

It’s not that I need to overclock an old video card when I can easily use a newer card if I’d like more performance. It’s more that by enhancing the cooling and seeing how much more performance is hidden in the device takes me back to my younger years when it became a way to saving a good chunk of money by investing in a cheaper CPU or video card and then squeezing out more FPS through some TLC.

The Voodoo 3 range runs pretty hot by default and don’t feature any active cooling. So back in the day it was fairly common for people to slap on a fan in a basic way in order to try and cool down the card a little.

The Voodoo 3 2000 ran at 143Mhz (GPU & RAM) by default which typically gave it quite a lot of headroom for speeding up. Where as the Voodoo 3 3000 running at 166MHz was normally running close to it’s limit. Those with a Voodoo 3 3500 were already at 183MHz and would be unlikely to squeeze much more out.

From research it seems that typically it’s the memory on the cards that give out before the GPU. With memory chips being used with speed ratings ranging from 6ns, 5.5ns to even some 5ns. Those with lower ratings having more headroom to run at higher speeds.

So what could I get some my card? First up, let’s attach that fan

The stock 3000 heatsink features two little holes at opposite ends which I thought would be perfect to looping a cable tie through. The first one went in without too much difficulty.

Unfortunately with the second I just couldn’t squeeze the damn thing through. After much frustration I instead put a screw through the fan and used some pliers to squash the metal of the heatsink onto the thread of the screw.

Not as elegant as I would have liked, but it’s held in place securely enough for my needs.

Once in the Pentium III mainboard it fits in nicely and thankfully doesn’t hit the PCI header next to the AGP slot (Of course I checked this prior to securing the fan…)

So after all that, how much more performance does this card have to give?

I turned to Unreal, as it was already installed and felt like a suitable game for the era of the hardware and ran a timedemo at 1024x768 and 1280x1024 resolutions

An extra 14MHz gives an additional 6.5% performance at 1024 with a higher 1280 resolution giving a higher 9% uplift. Not earth shattering, but certainly a nice little bonus.

Unfortunately if I pushed the card any further Unreal would get a little psychedelic

Yay for overclocking!