Aqua-Soft ForumsAti Radeon 9800 Pro
did you get it?
is it worth upgrading from a 9700 Pro?
What extra features does it have?
wow, brain->forum SPLAT!
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Originally posted by DHSMaroon13@Apr 28 2003, 07:37 PMdid you get it?
is it worth upgrading from a 9700 Pro?
What extra features does it have?
wow, brain->forum SPLAT!
Not really its not...
BUT, what you can do is get the hacked bios for the 9700 pro, to allow you to overclock the card, (it does o/c very well), to the core/memory speed of the 9700 pro... THEN you get hacked driver for catalyst 3.2 that makes the driver think you have a 9800 pro installed...
This will get you the same performance as the 9800 pro. The speed boost you see on the 9800 pro is mainly in the catalyst 3.2 drivers, but it only works on the 9200,9600 and 9800 cards ie: those cards using the r350 core. They disabled the boost for other cards. The hacked Driver basically sees your card as a 9800 thus enabling the speed boost (+200 pts in 3dmark03) and adds smoothvision 2.2.
Here is the Link for the Hacked Driver Wizzard's Page
And Here is the Link for the Hacked Bios Warp11's Hacked Bioses @ 3DChipset
To give you an example of how cool this is... and what started this whole mod was that the first revisions of the 9500 128mb non pro editions (sapphire and powercolor manufactures) were made on the same PCB (board) as the 9700's which was a 256bit board with only 4 rendering pipes, they were supposed only be 128bit. And then they found out that the Driver controlled how many pipes were used and not the hardware itself. So by hacking the driver and telling it that your installed 9500 non pro is a 9700 card, it then opens up all 8 rendering pipes that a 9700 has, then when you overclock the card, you can get performance of a 9700 and even a 9700 pro (with cooling mod).
The have since made another change where you can change the 9500 non pro to a 9800 via the driver hack so you can get the catalyst 3.2 speed boost and smoothvision 2.2.
I personally have one of these 9500 non pro's paid $150, got a special cooler that Thermaltake makes for OEMS for the 9700 that cools not only the GPU but the RAM as well for $17...
I was able to do a core/ram overclock of 350/315 from a stock 275/275.
I scored 15328 in 3dmark01 and 5188 in 3dmark03, this lands it between a stock 9700 pro and a 9800 pro. Not bad, paying $170 for at the time a $350 card's performance.
thanks! it sounds awesome, but:
i only see stuff 4 9500 and 9700 non pro
which one do i need to do what you described
No, U shouldnt upgrade, this is too little step. Like upgrading from P4 2,4 TO 2,41 no sense.
But If someone plans to buy a new card and has enough money it is a good offer. It beats all nvidias cards!
Originally posted by maximus-gratus@Apr 29 2003, 10:50 PMNo, U shouldnt upgrade, this is too little step. Like upgrading from P4 2,4 TO 2,41 no sense.
But If someone plans to buy a new card and has enough money it is a good offer. It beats all nvidias cards!
Eh, not quite that small. Increases of upto 40%, not that bad 
.
And to the guy that said the increases are only in the driver, hah! 
You can get some extra performance via the driver hack (Or upcoming 3.4's, which will be same paths for both cores), but its not the only difference between the R300 + R350.
Originally posted by Radea+May 3 2003, 04:33 PM-->QUOTE(Radea @ May 3 2003, 04:33 PM)