9500NP is now harder to mod, I believe

I dont know why anyone would attempt to hard mod the 9500np with solder, when conductive paint is 1000 times easier and safer.

I hard modded one of the 3 9500s I bought while searching for my perfect 9700 mod...the conductive paint worked great..and you can always flash the bios back to undo the mod's effects on screen.

But I have to agree w/j miller that often high quality chips are downgraded to meet the demand of an older/cheaper product. Its cheaper to manufature fewer types of a product...so common sense that this happens.

As for flawless 9700 mods? I have a flawless mod. I didnt bother hard-modding this card but after 3 months now I can see no flaws...I doubt im going to find a reason why it was downgraded...other then demand.

I think we should fight about it . . .

O....K....

I think maybe I'll just take up model shipbuilding.
It looks like fun to me.

or stamp-collecting. I hear that rocks lol

just got mine from newegg in has the infineon 3.3 memory and the p/n ends w/ 74240 so i think is the good one.

Exactly where are the markings on the RAM? I looked and didn't see any writing at all, except for 3-6 or 3.6 or something like that. Everyone else says there's a lot more writing on theirs. Am I not looking in the right place?

Z

See Sig... the softmod worked well....

the first 9500 i got... took the mod... but only OC'ed 337/607
then i RMA'ed it... cause i broke it... anyways... the new one i got... took the softmod.. and i found out it's OC capabilities...

i am so happy with the new card i got... finally in the 16k club!

"just got mine from newegg in has the infineon 3.3 memory and the p/n ends w/ 74240 so i think is the good one." -AMD900

Please tell us right away if it takes the (soft) mod and whether you get the =========== artifacts I described afterwards!


And then, when you have time, PLEASE look at the reverse side of the card and tell us if it has those two 14-pin chips or just one with 14-pins as I described on my first post to this thread!

Thanks for sticking to the topic!

well i formatted a hd and im istalling w2k and then im trying the soft mod but it wont be long.

It seems that a lot of people RMA things they break themselves. Does everyone just think this is okay, or is this what RMA was made for?



Z

" It seems that a lot of people RMA things they break themselves. Does everyone just think this is okay, or is this what RMA was made for?"

Call me a prig if you like, but I strongly condemn the idea of asking a vendor to accept merchandise that the buyer has damaged. If it happens enuf, the vendor develops a cynical and adversarial attitude towards his customers. We all suffer when the industry sprung up to serve our enthusiast needs feels we are unethical and therefore deserve to be exploited whenever possible.

So, no- that is *not* why God made RMA!

That was sort of a sarcastic comment. I'm very angered by the fact that so many people do it. It's not fair. I say if you wouldn't accept it if you were the owner of the store, don't do it yourself. And there's not a single person here that can tell me that if they owned a store and people were unfairly returning merchandise on THEIR dime, they wouldn't care. Even if Newegg isn't incurring the cost directly, ATI, NDIDIA, Abit, etc. ARE. You know what happens then? They get mad. They remove overclocking features so you won't be able to break it so they save money. They charge you more money to account for predicted loss due to stupid people. And they start hating you and it makes it more difficult to return a truly defective product.

Z

zachj- little problem with your theory.....they CANT raise prices and remain compeditive. i agree with the locking. but the price raising thing would just screw them over. you forget why they are in this. if they could raise prices and keep their market share they would do it. being worse with their warrenties again.....is again....bad for buisness.

I believe that at some people you started believing that coorportations aren't in this for making money. ati does not love you, nvidia does not love you. Overclockers represent a very slim % of overall sales. one overclocker however can convice 100 others to buy stock parts where companies get markup. computer experts are the best salesmen and will make or break a product. If the biggest "nerd" in a school says that ati sucks because of this this and this....he will affect hundreds of future purchases.

-end of rant

Can someone just delete this thread?

It started off on the wrong foot, and just went downhill fast

How many different p/n's are there?

Mine is 070284.

It is a newegg refurb and it has issues. I think someone tried to mod this one and didn't flash it back. These fill up the screen:

| | | | | | | | | |

| | | | | | | | | |

I can't get catalyst drivers to install.

zabomb4163 said:

zachj- little problem with your theory.....they CANT raise prices and remain compeditive. -end of rant

Click to expand...

Uh, yes they do and have. FFS just look at the price of cards now. Over $500 for a 256 MB ATI or NVIDIA. You can buy a computer for that money and a good one too with a hell of a lot more components. Granted the gamers market is not nearly as large, but believe me, these guys have some hefty profit margins. They are not doing this because of what zachj said either, it's just part of their overall marketing strategy. If NVIDIA were smart they would cut the price on the FX5900 by 150 or so and regain some of their market share. I don't think they are re-winning any ATI converts with their current pricing.

Pardon the delay, but I was on vacation.

Honestly, if I thought that any company "loved" me, that would make me crazy. Not only does it sound plain stupid, but it's certainly not true. HOWEVER, ATI loves my business. ATI does need me. And for that reason, they don't want to raise prices and reduce warranty coverage. Of course they want to raise prices. And if they could get rid of warranty coverage, they'd fall all over themselves to do it as fast as possible. But because there's competition, they can't do that. Instead, they have to lower prices to remain competitive.

Profit margin on high-end video cards is ludicrous. I'd wager they make at LEAST 300 dollars on a 500 dollar card, and that's crazy. Intel does it too.

My point is simply that it's not right to return something you broke. It wasn't their fault it broke. And you won't find any company still in business that doesn't add projected cost of things like warranty coverage and RMAs to the price of any item they sell. I'm not arguing that the price of an item would go down if nobody RMAed anything. That wouldn't happen. It's just not right and that's why one shouldn't do it.

Z

WOW WEEEE!!!!

As Yogi (not cartoon) said, D%&n, this is like deja-vu all over again!

Good chips bad chips, hard mods, soft mods, extreme mods,extreme physical mods, mod mods, blah, blah, blah!...

You get a card, mod it, (a lot of peope have explained: soft mod as on a graphics card or mobo, is flashing bios, diff drivers etc., hard mod when you solder etc. on the boards)

Since this seems to be widely accepted nomenclature, then I have soft modded my 9500pro, (flashed bios and changed drivers to 3.4 cats) AND "Hard Modded" the same by soldering (fixed)resistors to increase voltage + yada, yada, yada, to the core and mem. I am stating this for information only by the way, not to get into a p@$%ing contest about who is right/wrong, backwards/forwards or any type of debate on just what happens or whether or not everything I say is up for some type of argument. (those of whom this shoe fits...)

Anyway, what IS important and a heck of a lot of fun, having the 9500pro soft modded unlocked the ability for me to tweak (tweak... he he he... "I *my name here*ed my vid card settings!" lol) the core and mem of it, and to go to the next level, hard modded(???) the card to set those numbers to stupid higher settings.

Here's the beef... Setting mobo bios to 210X12 and running my amd barton 2500+ @ 2460mhz 1.92v at last benchmark (yea, RadMan volt modded the mobo, both 4 cpu and mem, he can't seem to ever let his soldering iron cool down, lol) setting the dual channel OCZ el ddr 3500 2 X 256 timings to 4332 @ 3.03v we ran stable 355/650 on that poor little 9500pro and the 3dmark01 score reached 15551 after just a few mild tuning of the settings. Most interesting thing is, we are still not running our best yet as during our fun, we seem to have more room to make that score much better! We shut it down yesterday to make a few case mods we were procrastinating about. BUT, towards the end of this week we will be up and running again tweaking (that word/name again, lol) to hit our next goal of 16000 3dmark01. A few friends of me and RadMan's have been buying each other beers hitting 16000 to 16300 on their 9700pro's while beating us up fpr only putting the 9500pro in our rig. My focus for the next few weeks is to reach and/or exceed their benchmarks with extra money in our budget to buy a lighted fan or two! lol

We will post our latest scores whan we have them and guaranteed will be asking all you pros for some great ( as usual here at the forums) advice and info on some tips to maximize our frame rates!

'til we meet again,

Happy Trails

Tweaker and RadMan

james.miller said:

No, i dont.

Umm, yeah. Like i said, to meet demand.

Look harder then. ALOT of people have brought 9500non-pro for the sole purpose of trying the mod. There are people on these forums who have brought 3 or more 9500np's to get a succsessfull card. there are also people who buy them because they are cheap, good performers ect.ect.

And so are you. Difference is, my opinion is based on FACT.

Click to expand...

Why the flame? Could you have just pointed out you had a different opinion? Well guess what your last comment is FLAT-OUT WRONG!!

You already stated earlier that you DO NOT work for ATI. Therefore you DO NOT know whether or not the 9700 cards are actually being binned into 9500's even after passing QC.

Sure the practice is evident, especially in 1700+ AMD CPU's. But you DO NOT know for fact that this is actually happening with ATI's products. Do you know what the demand is for the 9500 series?

Wait, the supply could actually be higher than the demand in this case.. Maybe there is more "broken 9700" being binned into 9500's than demand allows for? We'll never know this for sure.

There just might be a reason why the functioning softmodded boards made it to the market as 9500np... Take a minute and *think* (I know-- this might be a little hard for you, so bear with me):

Why would ATI "bin" the 9700's anyways unless they were actually defective? If demand was so high for the 9500np boards, wouldn't it be cheaper for them to just use 9500Pro's that either didn't make the grade, or speed bin those?

Common sense would tell you it would be cheaper to produce a card with a 128bit memory bus, and disable 4 pipelines, than to manufacturer a card with 256 memory bus, and disable both half the memory bus, and the 4 pipelines.


Whoa.. This might be getting a little over your head now, so take a minute to process all that information. When you really stop and *think* about it, it DOES NOT make sense for ATI to "bin" the 9700 series into 9500's.

I'm sure you know that ATI has a stripped down 9500Pro sold as a 9500np. (the card w/ RAM chips straight). So if demand for the 9500np was so high, it does make sense to speed bin the cheaper 9500pro boards, than it does the 9700's.

But it also makes sense to have a card based on the 9700 to sell as a 9500np.. Why? so they could sell the cards w/ the messed up pipelines, and malfunctioning 256bit memory bus.

Sure there are cards that work fine softmodded. Did you stop and think that maybe these cards actually *do* have something wrong with them, or they simply passed through QC unnoticed?

But the FACT (perhaps you should look that up in the dictionary) remains, I don't work at ATI, so everything I wrote is just opinion (actually it was written intentionally to be subjective to the post made by J.Miller, proving that post to be OPINION). I'm not here to shove information or my opinion down peoples throats. Apparently that strikes your fancy (did I say that right?), but don't expect people not to get offended when you flame other members of the forum for having their own opinion.

after reading some posts I noticed some argument ensuiing which I dont want to get into so I Stopped reading

just purchased a sappire 9500np from newegg for 145 shipped

soft mod worked no artifacts, running at 350/315 stable no problems with cheapo stock hs/fan

so it still works

(this is in reply to the orignal post none of the following ones)