Questions about flashing a BBA 9800 Pro to an XT...

Hi...I was reading the post on soft modding your 9800 pro to an Xt version.The guy who made the post has dead links to the BIOS's and to the PDF document for card owners that have Hynix RAM.

This is what ATItool reported about my video card:

Detected GPU Chip: R350 (4E48), 8 Pipelines, 128 MB

Is my card a candidate to flash to an XT version? If so,can someone post a link to the BIOS I would need,and any helpful articles that are up to date.The soft-mod post,like I said,seemed outdated,and the links are dead.

Thanks for your help guys!!! You rock

have a PCI card ready when you flash, cuzz you gonna be in the same situation like me now, i just flashed my card and it went way wrong, now i got to go n buy a PCI card to flash it back

uhm, the only thing flashing to an xt bios will gain you is a higher default clock and some slightly tighter mem timings (which your card may or may not like). that's it. I wouldnt do it.

http://www.rojakpot.com/default.aspx?location=3&var1=92&var2=0
http://www.techpowerup.com/bios/
thats all i can do for you sorry

So,essentially...all I have to do to match the performance gain of flashing to a XT is to just OC the core and mem speeds....thanks for saving me the trouble of possibly destroying my card!

sounds like a lot of myths, rumors and one bad experience.... really what you need to know if it's worth it is the type of core r360 or r350....? The type of memory your card uses and what pcb the card is on. The article at rojakpot will show you all the info you need to know. Just make sure you have the right bios to flash the card with. If you want to do it the easy way please use ati winflash (you can flash the card from within windows and it's a lot easier than doing it in dos). I've flashed mine a few times and never had a problem..... My 9800pro is now a 9800xt, complete with overdrive and temp monitoring. Hope this helps.

I've heard some people say they have had succesful flashing on the r350 core, if it was good memory.
Is that true, or just alot of wishful thinking?

from what I've seen you can do it with either.... you just have to have the r360 core and the xt pcb in order for it to be a "true" flash.... it will gain you some performance advantages although not much..... maybe a few hundred points in 3DMark. You can flash the older cards ie, r350 core and still gain some benefits however you'll be using a bios that wasn't really intended for that core... I've heard some people say you can get mild artifacts on some games and benchmarks but I've never seen this for myself.

Sounds like I'm just better off sticking with my Omega drivers, with the auto overclock.

Propilot said:

I've heard some people say they have had succesful flashing on the r350 core, if it was good memory.
Is that true, or just alot of wishful thinking?

Click to expand...

No its true. Ive flashed mine and I had an R350. Sure its a little sketchy but it worked just fine

Sentential said:

No its true. Ive flashed mine and I had an R350. Sure its a little sketchy but it worked just fine

Click to expand...

What do you mean by sketchy?

First of all, ATITool simply reads your current bios for the info on VPU, and since the 9800Pro was designed to have an r350, the bios was written for an r350, and hence ATITool will tell you you have an R350. This DOES NOT MEAN YOU HAVE AN R350! The only way to tell what vpu you have is to remove the heatsink and read the marking on the chip.

If you do have an R350, on a pro pcb, the best you will get from a flash is a pro running at xt speeds (which you can do without the flash). If you have an R360 on a pro pcb, you may get an additional boost in performance clock-for-clock vs a non-flashed card (a few hundered 3dmark03 points). If you have an R360 on an XT pcb, you may get the performance boost plus temp monitoring.

Before flashing, you should remove the heatsink to see what you have. If you are not willing to void the warenty of your card, forget about flashing and be happy with your pro (it is not a bad card after all). Most people who follow the instructions and make sure they have an R360 before they flash have good results, but of course nothing is certain.

Good luck

I already know it is a r350 from installing my cooler.
But damn.... look at my sig for clock speeds. It runs flawless at that overclock. Faster than a XT.
Maybe I should just be greatful for that?

You can flash it to an XT, but you will get artifacts in the latest games, since the R350 is missing shaders. I used to flash my 9800np to an XT just for 3DMark. For day to day usage, stay put. And yes, you definitely should be grateful for such high clocks.

mine a a R350 core with Hynix memory.I have an Arctic Cooler VGA Silencer on it and its overclocked to 384/357---without ramsinks.I dont know how much more I can push the memory speeds if I added those ramsinks.I have a set of 8 solid copper ramsinks,but need thermal tape/paste to apply them.I think I'll be happy with my 9800 pro as it is and not risk the damage.BTW....I didnt even try to find the max core/memory speeds because I got tired after an hour of each test with ATItool...but both showed no artifacts after 15 minutes at these speeds.How much further do you think the memory can be pushed if I apply those ramsinks?

Oops...I made a mistake with the OC clock speeds.I believe I overclocked my core to 424...but I am not at that computer.I remember the memory was OCed to 356.8...I'll update this with my real core OC speeds.LOL...a jump from 378 to 384 looked pretty silly when I went back to read this---especially with a AC VGA Silencer(Rev 3)