Following the instructions, I had the heatsink off the Voodoo3 3500 in a matter of minutes and easily installed the Stealth V3 Fighter on the board. Using needle nosed pliers makes the job quite a bit easier. Just pop out the V3 heatsink pins, remove the heatsink and then install the Stealth V3 Fighter using the supplied plastic pins (TennMax even included extras). The cooler lines up perfectly to the Voodoo3 pin layout and even a novice can handle this job. Using the standard Voodoo3 pin layout also makes the Stealth V3 Fighter a lot more stable and secure than other coolers that might rely on adhesive tape or glue for attachment. TennMax recommends using thermal paste if the V3 chip is not totally flat, and I used a thin layer of aluminum oxide thermal compound. If you don't want to use thermal compound don't worry, the Stealth V3 Fighter includes conductive thermal tape that will substitute quite well. After attaching the V3 Fighter, just install the card and hook the cooling fan to an open power plug. The Stealth V3 Fighter has a pass-through power cord, so don't worry about losing a valuable power cord.

The initial wave of Stealth V3 Fighter upgrades were sold for the Voodoo3 2000 cards, and met with incredible success. With the low clock speed of 143 MHz and the high incidence of 6 ns SDRAM on the cards, a good active cooling system certainly gave the card a lot of overclocking headroom. The Voodoo3 3000's 166 MHz speed and 6 ns memory still allowed for some serious overclocking and speeds of 190 MHz or more were common. The V3 3500's 183 MHz clock speed and 5.5 ns memory brings another cooling opportunity to the table.

One of the first points of interest is the locked Voodoo3 chip and memory speed. If you have a V3 3000, then both the memory and V3 chip are clocked at 166 MHz and in order to raise one, you must raise the other. This brings the speed of the card memory into the equation, since no matter how cool you get the V3 chip, you still have to contend with the stability of the SDRAM memory.