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.
Voodoo2 Cards Are Dying! Do This Before It's Too Late! - YouTube 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.
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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