I bought a voodoo3 3000 pci off of ebay. I installed it and all was fine except for in any game the card will run for an ammount of time then the system will lock. At first i thought is was heat so I installed a fan on the heatsink and a heatsink and fan on the back of the card aswell. Same problem, now the card is cool though. I am not overclocking it or anything like that. Here's the thing: On one of the pieces of ram there is a copper foil covering the top of it. It has four wires soldered to it, the other end of each wire is soldered to four small capacitors (c54, c59, 568, and c74). I have no idea what this is, and as near as i can tell this isn't a factory job since the solder is kinda bloby. I was thinking I could desolder it to see if the lockups stop and if it doesn't work without it I could put it back on. But does anyone have any idea what the heck this thing does? or have any ideas as to the cause of the lockups if not by this 'thingy'?

Have you tried first getting an updated driver for that card?

I go the drivers from here: http://www.voodoofiles.com/3201 and i've tried the card in 800mhz athlon, a 900 athlon, a 333 celeron, and a 433 celeron systems. Tried it with dx 7, 8, and 8.1

That copper thing is probably an RF (Radio Frequency) sheild. To keep RF noise either from escaping or getting into the card. Sounds kinda hoky.

to identify if the ram is the problem try the program 'burn in test' from: http://www.passmark.com/products/bit.htm It showed a bad stick of ram was the cause for my computer locking up when i tried running a game.

i also have a voodoo 3 3000 and was having that same problem. what i did was i went in the cmos at the start up and changed the agp speed from 4x to 2x because that card dosen't support 4x agp and after i did that my com ran and still runs fine.