Sapphire Radeon 9800 Pro for $209....a good deal?

SantiMun said:

I just got my sapphire 9800pro today. I don't want take the heatsink/fan off yet until I get my vga cooler. It's got the hynix memory but I couldnt find the temp monitoring chip. It also has the black plastic mounts instead of the gold metal ones. Does my card have the R360 core or do I have to RMA this thing??

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Pulling the cooler off is easy and will answer your question. To me, it looks like a R350 board based on the part number I see.

PWA part number differences.

SantiMun said:

I just got my sapphire 9800pro today. I don't want take the heatsink/fan off yet until I get my vga cooler. It's got the hynix memory but I couldnt find the temp monitoring chip. It also has the black plastic mounts instead of the gold metal ones. Does my card have the R360 core or do I have to RMA this thing??

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I have the EXACT same card, except Built by ATi.
I pulled off the heatsink and it was R360, but I would suggest you add some AS Creamique or AS5 because that thing heats up really hot.
Btw is your hynix have something on it saying F-28? I think that means it handels ~385mhz! which is higher than XT speeds, hehe. The VGA Silencer will help a lot. Right now I'm running on stock cooling with AS5 which stoped it from crashing, and I up'd the agp voltage to 1.7. I suggest you do the same. Your card will most likely be a R360 because it looks exactly like mine, except its a built by ati not saphire heh.

and no it doesnt have the temp monitoring on it nor does it have overdrive tab(if you do have the OD tab and dont have the monitoring chip, DONT TURN IT ON, or it will just keep on increasing clock speeds until is fries).

runs on 9800xt speeds fine on stock cooling for now, ima upgrade the cooling to whatever i can find thats NOT online hehe, no credit card.

are you sure its not a bba, because it has the bba heatsink, saphire has different heat sinks i thought.... hummmm

I spent about 30 minutes overclocking mine this weekend. I got it up to 430/360 wi no trouble at all. I actually got the core to 440, but I turned it down a little while I overclocked the memory (which went to 370 before any artifacts). I got a little over 6000 3DMark03, but this windows install is getting pretty cluttered, and I have really slow ram timings and, blah, blah. At any rate, I'm probably going to get another 9800 this week when I replace the mobo and cpu, and I'll try again. I'm gonna sell this one to a buddy of mine. Maybe I'll have better luck this time around.