9800 Non pro....

Ok I jsut got my 9800 Non Pro, and I am wondering if I should flash to 9800 PRO bios? If so where can I find the software I need, and what do you guys recommend for cooling? I was thinking removing the shim, and lapping the stock cooler with some AS3 for now. I am not looking for balls to the wall speed here. I jsut want to get to like 9800 Pro speeds. I figure thats a safe bet I would assume. I want to believe full-heartedly that I needed this upgrade from a 4600 GF4.

Try searching over at the www.rage3d.com forums. That's where I got a hold of a new 9800 Pro bios. You'll need a program called flashrom to load the bios because the atiflash program won't work as I hear it.
I took off the stock heatsink and installed a 1u low profile copper cooler on there and did not need to remove the shim since it seems to be the same height as the core. With the new cooler and 9800 Pro bios, I'm getting much higher than default 9800 Pro speeds.
BTW, I have both a Ti4600 and a 9800np and don't regret the upgrade one bit. It's head and shoulders above the Ti4600 when you enable antialiasing and anistropic filtering.

How did you connect the heatsink? Thermal epoxy?

I drilled to holes in the new heatsink that line up with holes on the board. Then I used two small bolts (~1 cm long) with a nylon washer and a nut. Thermal epoxy would probably work fine as well.

Here is a link to a thread I started when I got my 9800np (page 2) showing the new heatsink installed. If you read the whole thread, it goes into detail about overclocking it from stock, then adding the heatsink then flashing the bios.

You have overclocked it to be sure it will run @ 9800PRO speeds? I wouldn't flash it until I was sure it would run ok at PRO speeds.....

So long as you save the original bios image, I wouldn't worry too much about flashing to a pro bios. You can always restore the original bios if you have problems.

i flashed my 9800 np with a superb result, i could raise the gpu/mem speed by 40mhz and 20mhz. i don't know the reason but it works..