ATI Radeon Modification Poll

[Black_Paladin]

did you flash the 9700Pro bios on a softmodded 9500 non-pro ? or was it the hardware mod?

Flashing is not necessary if you are using the soft-mod. The modified drivers allow you to overclock with no problem. You may only see a benefit from flashing the BIOS if you have done the hardmod.

 

[Black_Paladin]

Bump

 

[james.miller]

Don't know if you guys knew about this but check this thread out.
http://www.rage3d.com/board/showthread.php?threadid=33667164

Basically you flesh your card with Radeon 9700 Pro BIOS and paff you are:
1. running 325/620
2. able to o/c it even higher

I had mine ( flashed with Warp11 PAL BIOS ) o/c 351/606 highest... Now my friends i have it 351/650

a 9500 non-pro? at 650 ram? just with a different bios? somehow, i dont think thats possible. especially with the ram thats on these 9500 non-pros

 

[Black_Paladin]

a 9500 non-pro? at 650 ram? just with a different bios? somehow, i dont think thats possible. especially with the ram thats on these 9500 non-pros

Isn't the RAM on the 9500 boards the same as the 9700 non-pro boards though? The 9500 board I returned had 3.3ns infineon chips I believe. The 9700 pro boards on the other hand, have 2.86ns Samsung memory.

I doubt that you can hit 650 with a 9500 myself though because I don't think the 3.3ns modules can do it without a volt mod. I had gotten my 9500 up to 300mhz from the default speed of 275mhz and I think that's pretty much the limit for the 9500 and the 9700 non-pro boards.

 

[james.miller]

my 9500 maxes out at 310. apparently some people have managed around 680 with the hynix 3.6 (WTF????????) with a 9700pro bios. BTW the non-pros use 2.86ns samsung.

 

[Black_Paladin]

apparently some people have managed around 680 with the hynix 3.6 (WTF????????) with a 9700pro bios.

Hold on, that makes no sense. 3.3ns is *really* pushing it at that speed and people are claiming that they are doing this with 3.6ns RAM??!! The people achieving that speed MUST have volt modded the memory as people even with 9700 pros can't go much above 700mhz with the 2.86ns memory. It's not a big deal really. My 8500 has 3.6ns Infineon and I volt modded it and ran it at 380mhz (760mhz in DDR terms) for 2 days before it burned so speeds above 700mhz *can* be reached with even 3.6ns memory but with a voltmod. Without a voltmod, I won't believe it unless I see it.

 

[james.miller]

me neither. thinking about it though - we HAVE seen this before.how many times have we seen kingston valueram pc2100 clocking at 180mhz, beating some pc2700 modules? its does happens, just not often.

 

[Black_Paladin]

me neither. thinking about it though - we HAVE seen this before.how many times have we seen kingston valueram pc2100 clocking at 180mhz, beating some pc2700 modules? its does happens, just not often.

True, but I think graphics RAM is more limited than system RAM in many ways. For one thing, you can increase the voltage for your system RAM on most motherboards which helps overclocking it further but you can't increase the voltage for your graphics card's RAM through BIOS.

I don't think the people that reached 180mhz with their Kingston RAM managed to do it at their RAM's default voltage. Heck, even my Corsair PC3500 RAM won't do its rated speed at its default voltage of 2.5V's.

 

[james.miller]

true, true.

edit: well heres one for the poll - iv'e succseefully softmodded my card into a 9800 - not quiet at 9800 stock speed though

 

[Black_Paladin]

well heres one for the poll - iv'e succseefully softmodded my card into a 9800 - not quiet at 9800 stock speed though

SWEET!! These mods really rock, don't they? Altough the 9800 mod is not a "real" mod is it? You just make a 9500 or a 9700 be identified as a 9800 and make it use the 9800 drivers improving performance if I understand this right.

 

[james.miller]

spot on! it does exactly that. and yes, it DOES work! though i'm having a little problem with the 3.2 cats - i cant get clone to work correctly now.

Performance is definatly better though.

 

[Black_Paladin]

Cool!
How much performance did you gain by doing the 9800 mod? Did you run any 3dmark tests yet?

You know, I think this is just hilarious. Get a $160 card, mod it and you have a card that performs very similar if not the same as a $400 card!

I wish the 9500 that I got didn't have any artifacts.

 

[james.miller]

i havnt thoroughly tested it yet - but it seems to be inline with everybody else who has done the mod - anywhere from 5% to 15% in some tests. fill-rate is definatly up (1814/2610 from 1571/2191) aswell as some others

oh BTW, i didnt even pay anything for my r9500. jealous now?

 

[Black_Paladin]

fill-rate is definatly up (1814/2610 from 1571/2191) aswell as some others

WOW, that *is* a nice improvement. You know, I'm wondering now if most of the performance increases the 9800 cards are getting over 9700 cards are not just coming from the better drivers.

I mean the F-buffer and all that about hardware optimizations for 9800 cards sound good but if the drivers for the 9800 cards are responsible for such big performance increases, then maybe the 9800 cards are actually overhyped for their performance over the 9700 cards!

oh BTW, i didnt even pay anything for my r9500. jealous now?

Oh, man I *am* really jealous now! Getting a $160 card and modding it to reach the same performance of a $400 card is one thing but not paying zilch and getting this kind of performance is totally another thing.

How you did you get your card for free???

 

[james.miller]

it was brought for me as a thankyou for fixing a friends pc

hehe - $400 card? don't mind if i do!

i was thinking the same thing about the 9800's. we should watch this one closely....I mean, the 9800's are faster - but it now seems like its more due to a higher clockspeed and optimised drivers than anything else.

 

[Black_Paladin]

i was thinking the same thing about the 9800's. we should watch this one closely....I mean, the 9800's are faster - but it now seems like its more due to a higher clockspeed and optimised drivers than anything else.

Yeah, I agree. Having read the 9800 mod and the improvement you are getting with it, I decided not to go for a 9800 pro 128Mb card. Like you said, the performance increase you are getting with the new drivers is big enough, add to that the clock speed increase the 9800 has over a 9700 and pretty much all you have is an overclocked 9700 with better drivers. The performance increase coming from the hardware optimizations should be really minor once you take out the clock speed increase AND the better drivers.

You know, it's good to know this stuff really because I might have ordered a 9800 pro 128mb if I didn't know where the big performance increase was coming from. Now I know. As it is, I will still be waiting for the 256mb version of the 9800 pro and see if its memory is higher clocked or not (the rumor about the DDR-II memory clocked at 460mhz on that card could still be true as we know for sure that the card will be using DDR-II memory). On the other hand, if the clock speeds on the card (especially the memory clock) end up being the same as the 128mb 9800 pros though, I will just go and buy a 9700 pro.

I am *certain* that just the extra 128mb memory on that card alone will not be justifying its price tag because 256mbs will be overkill for even Doom 3 at 1600x1200 (Carmack had said that Doom 3 would be using at about 80mbs of textures).

To me it looks like ATI really hyped up the 9800 pro because it looks like it really *is* an overclocked 9700 pro like we thought initially. For a moment, when the review sites showed that all the extra performance of the card over a 9700 pro was not coming from its clock speed alone, I had fallen for the hardware changes being responsible but now I know better.

Probably the reason ATI did this is to just fight nVidia's hype card - the dustbuster. Now I think about it, this is really lame actually. First, nVidia comes up with the NV30 which was really hyped up for months and then turns out to be a big disappointment and now the 9800 pro we all thought would be much faster than a 9700 pro is turning out to be a disappointment as well! Geee, I wonder what both ATI and nVidia have been doing all this time then??!! Right now, it looks like we should just skip both the NV AND the ATI cards that just got released and wait for the next generation stuff to really get an increase in performance. There is one good thing that comes out of all this though. The new cards, whether they suck or not, should drive the prices of the current cards down so we can buy a 9700 pro for performance or a ti4200 for great bang for the buck. I think that the ti4200's might especially sell so well now if their prices drop some.

 

[Ryan T]

Hi,

I just got one of the red pcb 9500np's from newegg. I softmodded it and it bumped my fill rates from 926.1/1102.3 to 1557.9/2149.2. I also noticed a 1000 point jump in 3Dmark2001 SE. I get no artifacting in Jedi knight 2, Americas Army, UT2003 or any other games I've played. I got a possible artifact at the end of 3Dmark SE during the part with the horse rotating. It looks like a strip kinda white colored on the side about an inch long. It's only on one side of the horse. The reason I say possible is because I see the same thing with both my new ATI card and my old Nvidia card. I've also seen the "artifact" on my friends computer, he has an ATI 7500 all in wonder. My biggest problem I've found is that 3Dmark2003 crashes during the nature test. I can't remember the exact message but it said something like my video card has run out of memory. For the first test I got an avarage of 60 fps and on the second and third I got maybe 4 or 5 fps avarage . The card runs Jedi Knight 2 at fun blast perfectly smooth along with UT2003, both with 4x AA and 8x AF on. My limit is 1024x768 (older moniter) so it's easy for my to set all my games at the highest level. Here is my computers specs if it helps any. ASUS P4PE mobo, Intel 1.8A Ghz P4, 258 MB Crucial DDR PC2100, 30 gig 7200 rpm hard drive, 48x CD-RW. I scored just under 10,000 with 3Dmark2001 SE but I think my computer had more to do with that than the card. If anyone has any idea as to why my computer runs 3Dmark2003 so slow and then crashes please let me know. Also I did not overclock the card any yet. I downloaded Rage3D tweak to see what my core and memory clock speeds were. Rage3D has the option to overclock but at this point i'm not really interested in overclocking. Once I figure out if my card is really artifact free or not i'll take part in the poll.


Thanks,
Ryan

 

[Black_Paladin]

Ryan, the problem with the 3dmark Nature test is probably the drivers. Since you didn't overclock the card, we can rule its being unstable out. Also, modding the card to a 9700 should have no cause to make it crash either.

What I would do is uninstall the drivers and then reinstall them and see what happens. In addition, if you are getting something like 10000 3dmarks with that 9500 after the mod, then your system is severely bottlenecking it. As a result, I would suggest overclocking your CPU. You have a P4PE and a perfectly good 1.8A man, why not overclock it? I bet you can overclock the 1.8a to at least 2.4ghz without pushing the voltage too much. That should give you a healthy increase in terms of 3dmark scores.

A 1000 point difference in 3dmark is really not much. My opionion is that, if you don't get a better CPU or overclock your current one, there really is not much of point in modding your 9500 to a 9700 because the 9700 cards are normally bottlenecked by even 3ghz CPUs.

For instance, I have a 1.6a CPU but I'm running it at 2.8Ghz and my Radeon 9500 card before the mod was giving me 11700-11800 3dmarks, but after the mod, it gave me 14800 or so. Then I went ahead and overclocked the card to 380mhz core and 300mhz memory and got about 16500 3dmarks. Even then, I knew that my system was creating a bottleneck.

But hey, thanks for participating in this poll.

 

[Ryan T]

Thanks for the help. I did have a bit of trouble getting the patch to go on the 3.2 catalyst drivers. The instructions said to go into hardware profiles and unpdate the graphics card driver after I replaced one of the sys files. Well I went there and it said it could not find any driver that was better than the one I allready had. So I went ahead and tried the texture fill rate just to see if it somehow worked and sure enough it did. Also I had the tv out working when I had the unpached drivers but after I patched them the tv out won't work anymore. So I'm going to reinstall the drivers and patch. Any suggestions on which version catalyst drivers to get? I would still like to find out what that "artifract" is. If anyone has any ideas let me know.

About the cpu overclocking. I got the 1.8A because it has better overclocking abilitys than the standard 1.8 Ghz cpu. I never did get around to overclocking it because I've been pretty satisfied with the speed of the system so far. My main concern is the heat generated by overclocking. My cpu runs at 37c idle and around 44c during games with stock cooling. I don't know how much heat is too much but i'm guessing the more heat you subject your cpu to the shorter it's life span is. I don't know if this is much of a problem or not. This week I'll look into overclocking some more. I might just try it to see how much faster my system runs. The biggest thing I need to upgrade is ram. I'm really slowing down when i have a few apps open. By the way, I just downloaded Microsofts ralisport challenge and I think it should be added to your list of games. I was stunned at how real the cars look. I would highly suggest getting the demo even if you don't like sports games.


Ryan

 

[Ryan T]

well I formated my hard drive and installed a fresh copy of windows XP today. I finally figured out how to properly do the patch so everything works now. I scored 3600 something in 3Dmark2003, and 9600 in 3Dmark2001. I did see very slight dots under the boat on 3Dmark2001 so I put my vote on the second option for the poll. I still have not overclocked the card to 9700 pro levels. Does the 3Dtweak really work for that? I'm going to try to overclock my cpu to 2.5Ghz tomorrow. I want to see how much it will affect the benchmarks.




Thanks,
Ryan