x800 pipemod?

ok, i've heard it referred to a few times in the forums, i did a search on it to find some info about it, but it only turned up a new place where it was mentioned in passing. Obviously if you look at my sig, i dont have one, but i was curious as to how people figured out how to do it, seeing as how last i checked, no one had any idea how it could be done, if it was at all possible. also, from looking at the card database, odds arent so good for it.

Currently there are two mods.

One is for normal Pro cards and involves rejoining the laser cut bridge on the die with some conductive paint. I think they figured this one out just by closely examining the core and noticing the cut bridge on the Pro, and then comparing it to an XT-PE which has no cut bridges. This seems to be hit and miss.

The other is for VIVO cards (which have the Sam1.6 memory), and involves flashing them with a particular Gigabyte BIOS using the proprietary Gigabyte flashing software (as I understand it). It appears that the default ATi flasher doesn't completely erase and reprogram the old BIOS - it leaves some things intact (ie: DeviceID and # of pipelines) whereas the Gigabyte flasher flashes the whole thing. AFAIK everyone who has tried to enable the extra four pipes on a VIVO has been able to. I think this one was discovered as people were playing around with different BIOSes.

so, if you do a softmod via the gigabyte flash utility, you wont have to rejoin the bridges?

that sounds pretty painless. Its one big argument in favor of x800pro.

The softmod only works if its a VIVO card. The folks that have got this working indicate that the bridges are not cut on those cards for some reason...

where can i get this gigabyte flash utility and x800xt bios from? does anyone have a link? Thanks

here is the link:
http://www.station-drivers.com/page/atidriv bios.htm

rage3d thread about mod:

http://www.rage3d.com/board/showthread.php?t=33766704

From the sounds of it, unless you're sure you have a VIVO card, you can do some damage to a non-vivo card, since it seems they've not been laser cut... only hardware locked.

I've done a lot of searching and the VIVO cards appear to be more available over seas than here in the states....

does the Asus have vivo or is it lacking that. I might pickup a Sapphire if push comes to shove.( To bad they don't have a black PCB version like they did with 9800).

After a bit more reading:

You seem to be correct gsboriqua ... the majority of users talking about VIVO seem to be non-north americans...

I'm still a bit confused on this...

Anyone offer any answers...?

i'm planning to do the mod if i can get my hands on some conductive paint or something similar to do the mod with... but my main concern is, what happens if the mod doesn't work? can you just remove the paint and return the card back to normal?

Hopefully...

Most people report that at least.

I attempted the mod before I even tested the card itself, and it seemed to be DOA...

Either way, if the pipelines were disabled, and you connected them, it wouldn't have any effect on the card...