Well, I took a gamble, and I'm not sure yet if I think it was really fair, but I'll discuss that later. I went and got a Sapphire 9800SE thinking I could open the other 4 pipes and get 9800NP performance. Of course, it didn't work out that way. Typical.
Mod went fine, but when I tried to play games or run benches, I got those nice little boxes in diagonal patterns on my screen. Naturally, I was less than pleased. After a bit of research, I found a few solutions to test. One suggested disabling my Hierarchial Z with RTool. I went and downloaded the tool. I succeeded, but not the way I thought.
I first tried messing with my AA/AF settings, which of course did nothing. I then tried disabling Hierarchial Z. That had no more effect than to lower my performance. I saw the next option on there -- Z masking -- and wondered if that might also be the cause. I was correct. After entirely disabling Z masking, all the little black boxes were gone. I tested many other settings, but only this one worked. The downside to this fix: it costed me 400 2K3Marks (4900-4500). I'm glad it works, but the hit isn't exactly what I'd hoped for when I purchased the product. Oh well, at least it works, and much better than anything I could get with an overclock.
On an off note, I'm still considering RMAing the card because I'm not sure if it's going to survive. If I look closely I see waves in my display even without softmod. The only other time I've seen that was when I overclocked my GF4 Ti4200 to an unstable clock. I don't know if I want to risk having this card die on me -- I'd rather not get stuck dealing with a Sapphire RMA over Newegg's RMA policies.
Mod went fine, but when I tried to play games or run benches, I got those nice little boxes in diagonal patterns on my screen. Naturally, I was less than pleased. After a bit of research, I found a few solutions to test. One suggested disabling my Hierarchial Z with RTool. I went and downloaded the tool. I succeeded, but not the way I thought.
I first tried messing with my AA/AF settings, which of course did nothing. I then tried disabling Hierarchial Z. That had no more effect than to lower my performance. I saw the next option on there -- Z masking -- and wondered if that might also be the cause. I was correct. After entirely disabling Z masking, all the little black boxes were gone. I tested many other settings, but only this one worked. The downside to this fix: it costed me 400 2K3Marks (4900-4500). I'm glad it works, but the hit isn't exactly what I'd hoped for when I purchased the product. Oh well, at least it works, and much better than anything I could get with an overclock.
On an off note, I'm still considering RMAing the card because I'm not sure if it's going to survive. If I look closely I see waves in my display even without softmod. The only other time I've seen that was when I overclocked my GF4 Ti4200 to an unstable clock. I don't know if I want to risk having this card die on me -- I'd rather not get stuck dealing with a Sapphire RMA over Newegg's RMA policies.