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- Joined
- Dec 3, 2017
- Messages
- 46
First of all if you're not familiar with these boards.. They are basically two 3DFX Voodoo 2 chipsets in SLI on a single board. 4 boards = 8 Voodoo 2 chipsets that were used to achieve 4 tap rotated grid FSAA with no performance loss. These boards were used for military simulation and even NASA supposedly used them for certain configurations. (You can look up thedodgegarage to see more detailed information on these. Yes Gary Donovan I see you )
Around December of last year, I ended up snagging an extremely rare Quantum3D Obsidian 2 200SBi board on eBay that has a black PCB with the full-length heatsinks and 125MHz EDO from the later green PCB revision boards. The board also had the rare "546-0014-05" BIOS.. I've contacted every Quantum3D collector that I know personally and so far it's the only known 200SBi with this configuration in existence.
Anyways, I ended up contacting the company that I bought the board from and of course the eBay operator was out sick... At that point, I called back every single day within minutes of the store opening to try and reach him. I eventually got in touch with the guy and asked if he had any more of the boards (In hopes that a full brick came in) and to my surprise, he had the other 3 boards with the bridge and all the hardware to mount them together. Unfortunately, the case and the rest of the system was recycled :c at least they had the common sense to not recycle the 200SBi's!!!!
I promptly paid him over the phone (Trying to keep my cool and not scream with excitement) and the 3 boards + bridge + hardware, were then on their way to my house.
At this point, I was freaking out like someone that had just won a 1million dollar lotto, as this was my dream to obtain a Mercury brick. I was useless at work that day from my excitement.
When I received the 3 other 200SBi's, they all matched the first one however, they had 100MHz EDO instead of the 125MHz memory.. Interesting?
The only logical explanation that I can come up with is that these boards were manufactured at the EXACT point where they were switching to the new green PCB models and some parts got mixed in the process. Which makes this a very unique brick!
Of course, I had to assemble it because I couldn't hold in my excitement any longer.
As I tested the boards the results were as follows.
--125MHz EDO board (Board 1)--
Perfect with no issues
--100MHz EDO board (Board 2)--
Perfect with no issues
--100MHz EDO board (Board 3)--
Texture errors
--100MHz EDO board (Board 4)--
Shows blue tinted image in 2D (Passthrough) perfect image in 3D
For the year after acquiring these boards I was mostly focused on other retro PC projects and wanted to wait for the time to give my full effort into resurrecting this brick and making it 100% functional.
That time is now.
After finding out that the board with texture errors only had some loose pins on the QFP TMU on the far end of the board I started my re-work.
In progress (Somewhere around 14-16 pins loose on the top right of the TMU. Some on the top pins and some on the right-hand side upper pins. Nothing some quality flux paste and a nice iron + microscope can't handle!
200SBi before re-work
200SBi after re-work
And that leaves me here!!
I'm currently troubleshooting the board with the blue image in 2D with a couple of my very intelligent retro hardware enthusiast friends. More updates to come!!
