Voodoo 4 mod from 32 to 64 MB RAM: finaly, succes!

[Komponent]

Originally posted by Hiero

@Komponent: I'd like to talk to you via msn or icq:
Hiero86(at)Hotmail.com  173-968-464

Hiero

Originally posted by Hiero

Look I got a lot of 5ns ram available....

Sorry for the delay
I don't use Instant Messenger services, no YM or MSN, but my private e-mail is not a secret: Komponent@gmail.com .
Good find the 5ns modules! What are your intentions about how to make use of them?

[dragoon_unit]

Good job!

How do you solder it?
A regular solder station won't work.

[Komponent]

Originally posted by dragoon_unit

Good job!
How do you solder it?
A regular solder station won't work.

Thanks...
Soldering 86-pin SDRAM chips with a regular soldering iron might not be impossible, but rather might take fabulous skills, so I used a heat gun a.k.a. a hot-air gun. Even so, the process demands great attention and it must be done with extreme care. I have recently killed one other Voodoo 4 attempting to perform the modding again and I am still sad about it, because of that.
An advice for everyone who want to do that work themself: never rush, allways stay focused when working with old, rare and sensitive parts like those ones.

[zourui]

congratulation!!!!
i am going to copy you

[Komponent]

Originally posted by zourui

congratulation!!!!
i am going to copy you

Hi,
Have you finalized the mod yet? Does it work fine? If you missed that out, after you solder in place the extra memory modules, you also need to edit the BIOS, to change "number of chipsets" value from 0 to 1, that is to instruct the card to use the second virtual memory bank.
Please come back with news to let us know if there is another homemade Voodoo4 with 64Mb born.

A small update for the project to add more memory to VSA100 povered 3DFX cards:
You should know that years ago HankSemenek had published the instructions about how to connect the A11 line adress from the RAM chips to the VSA100 if one were to mod a Voodoo5 5500 AGP from 64Mb to 128Mb. Here it is the picture:

There were no datas, though, about how to do the same thing on a Voodoo4 PCI PCB, so I took off with the heat-gun the GPU out off a V4PCI, the I searched and found the points for the connections that one would need to connect to the RAM pins for doing the modding to 64Mb memory. Here is the picture, with the extra-connection-points marked:

I hope it could be of some help to someone, someday...