In my experience with the Voodoo3 boards, there are 2 tests that can bring out problems with overclocked boards: Quake 2 and Unreal Tournament. UT seems especially hard to run for long periods on any but the most stable hardware. The first test involved running Massive1 a couple of times, then finishing off with a few rounds of Crusher. I then played through the 4 Unreal Tournament deathmatch maps several times to see if I could get it crash to the desktop. After that, I ran a few Quake 3 Test demos just to make sure it was totally stable.

Starting with the Voodoo3 3500, I was careful in my overclocking experiments. This is due to the already high 183 MHz speed of the 3500 and the fact that it's a very expensive 3D card. Using the Voodoo3 Overclocker ver. 3.1, I moved up to 185 MHz with no issue, then 187, then 189 and finally 193 MHz. I shut down the PC and found the Stealth V3 Fighter to be slightly warm, showing that the cooler was doing its job. I progressed slowly up the MHz chart, thankful of the warning screen that let's you reboot if you've clocked the Voodooo3 too high. After a lot of testing, I found myself running at the magical 200 MHz setting without any sort of problems or crashes. Making a long story short, I finally hit 209 MHz and found it stable in my testing. I tried to go a bit higher and found that while Quake 2 worked perfectly, the finicky Unreal Tournament would boot me out with an error. At this point, I think the heat of the Voodoo3 chip was simply getting too high for UT to handle. I was very pleased with the speed results and found that the Stealth V3 Fighter is cooler at 209 MHz than the standard Voodoo3 heatsink is at 183 MHz.

Since I had applied thermal compound to the cooler, it was easily removed from the V3 3500 and installed on the V3 3000. After re-installing the Voodoo3 3000, I jumped the clock speed up to the same 183 MHz speed I reached with the standard heatsink. Everything seemed to be working fine and I immediately took it to 190 MHz to do some real testing. The Voodoo3 3000 ran through the tests at 190 MHz without issue and I tried 191, then 192 MHz with the same results. Throwing caution to the wind, I tried 195 MHz and it ran the Quake 2 tests no problem. After playing a few maps of UT, I was dumped to the desktop with a texture error. After experiencing my first failure I shut the PC down and inspected the Voodoo3 3000 to make sure everything was functioning properly. The Stealth V3 Fighter was slightly warm, so I knew it was transferring heat properly, and I don't think that the V3 chip was the problem. I dropped the speed down to 194 MHz and completed all the testing. With the Stealth V3 Fighter providing some excellent cooling, I feel that I had just come up against the physical limitation of my SDRAM.