Here It Is For All To See, My Unlocked X1800GTO

[rkasa]

Are all the connect 3d's still 100% unlockable? anyone had a bad card yet?

I may have the only Connect 3D card which can't be unlocked. I ordered it from Monarch on 4/28. The first thing I noticed is that it didn't have the 6th chip on the right of the board. I've tried flashing with the Sapphire xl bios, then with a flash.bat file and an empty bios and the 'newbios' command followed by a sapphire xl bios. Then back to a Sapphire alone, with no 'newbios'. This appeared to ive me temp, speed, and volt control in ATITool, but still only 12 pipes.
I get a Device ID of 7109, and a GB_pipe_select of 0x227E4. Any thoughts on how to unlock the 4 pipes?

 

[chron]

Your four pipes probably won't get unlocked, best bet is to try overclocking with the existing 12 pipes. Sorry dude. You could try selling it on ebay and then going to newegg and getting yourself an HIS one... Thats where I got mine.

I downloaded Everest Home Edition and I was pleased to see that it was reading my card as an "X1800 XL" instead of just "X1800 series"...

 

[Tonyjack]

Hi chron,

For your information, I use a seasonic S12 500w power supply and an Asrock dual sataII mobo. I think the only problem with your card is related to the abilty to change voltage.
The method described back in this thread worked for me and it's only after having it working that I was able to change the core voltage. Before that I couldn't get my core to more than 560 stable on stock cooling, so the overclock you're getting now is perfectly normal. If you are able to 'activate' the ability to change voltage via software(atitool or overclocker), you will see much better results. And 62 degrees for the voltage regulators isn't bad. I see up to 70 degrees on mine.

As for Atitool artifact scanning (beta 14), it works pretty well for me.

BTW, I don't remember using a chinese bios on my card, the first bios i used was the sapphire xl one, then i flashed with the modified Bgnomes bios. Are you sure you flashed with the right bioses?

 

[chron]

Ah, thanks Tonyjack. Yea, I downloaded the two files from the links provided and used version 3.09 to flash it, and thats when it crashed. I think maybe with new drivers and new utility programs, the voltage control should be available someday on this bios. I suppose I'll stick with what I have.

Are there any other utilities that can set voltage correctly that I should try?

And btw - ATItool finds artifacts at 550 but my ATI Tray Tools artifact scanner does not... I dont know which one to trust, lol.

 

[coustang]

anyone knows the stock volts on x1800xt?

I believe the stock voltage settings for my card (X1800XT 512) were 1.275v core & 2.097v mem.

 

[Tonyjack]

Ok so I finally had some time to play with my gto. This is what I got. I'm running an opteron 144 on a dual sataII 315*9, ram is 2gb ocz 2-3-2-10 @ 210mhz.

It's the first time I run benches, so I don't know if I could optimize my system better but anyways, I'm satisfied.

I messed a bit with different bioses on my card. First, I modified my bios and put the ram timings of an x1800xt that are more relaxed, just to see if I could reach higher clocks on the mem, and it was not very conclusive. I couldn't get really more (like 10 mhz or so) and it slashed 500 points in 3dmark05.

After, since I was getting good speeds, similar to an xt, I modified an 256mb xt bios to have the core and the mem at 600 (speeds which i can get with xt voltage) and flashed it to my card. It resulted in horrible corruption and I reverted to my original settings booting from the floppy disk that had the flash.bat file and the 2 bioses like in the procedure described by topgear57. I just typed "flash" when I thought I had reached the prompt and everything went back to normal.

I'm still thinking about the xt bios though cause I flashed it with winflash and maybe I should have went with atiflash. What do you think? could it give different results? I'm not afraid of trying it but I don't want to waste time...

 

[chron]

you can optimize windows with different things. First off, goto run>services.msc and stop and disable the themes service. This will give you a little bit of a performance boost as it gives up some ram.

Hey, do me a favor buddy, count how many mosfets there are by the voltage regulator heatsink? Do you have all6 or just 5? I can't find an x1800xl with all 6, i think these things might limit performance.

 

[chron]

sorry - its called Themes in the services list.. incase you couldn't find it


BTW - I heard the IceQ version of the card is actually an X1800XT.. Anybody hear anything on this?

I used ATIflash in dos. I hear its the safest way. Dude, go ahead and flash an XT bios to it. Its not gonna make any difference exept voltages and clock speeds will be set to default XT speeds so theres no need to load profiles or anything

 

[chron]

I'VE DONE IT!


I recently was able to attain 600/625 by downloading the modified bios from http://www.guildwarsguru.com/forum/showpost.php?p=1222326&postcount=1

The bios is a modded X1800GTO bios with 16 pipes unlocked. After that I loaded the bios into the NEW VERSION of RaBiT found at techpower up. I changed my core voltage to 1.2 volts (most I could do since there is a 10% limit) and saved the bios and flashed it.

Afterward I was extremely pleased to see stable clocks above 600/625. I think my core got arround 625 and my mem arround 650 before i saw alittle artifacting and beyond that gave me a system freeze.

Safe operating speeds for me now are 600/625... before it wouldn't go above 540/580...

hey i also found that if you continually load the bios into rabit after updating the voltages, you can push it up to 1.46. I'm going to try 1.46v on the core...

Is there anything bad that can happen if I volt mod too much?

 

[chron]

 

[Vipe]

Limited OC succes with HIS GTO

OK guys i have got it, thanks to pokey006's help from another forum, i now have the exact method that should get all your voltage changing option working in ati tool. You can check in rivatuner when you increase your gpu voltage and it should now change as its supposed to.

Get atiflash 3.09 and put both files on a floppy
Next download sapphire xl bios from techpowerup.com and throw that on the floppy as well, i changed the name of my bios to a short name so it works easy in dos such as sapxl.bin
Next you can download Bgnomes modified bios from here if you have a card that unlocks to 16 pipes like mine.x1800GTO Modified Bios

If yours does not unlock to 16 then you can just use your default GTO bios for this step.

Anyway copy that bios to your floppy as well, i named mine gtomod.bin
And last thing you can make a flash.bat file by just making a new text document and inserting the lines exactly as shown here

atiflash -newbios -f -p 0 sapxl.bin
atiflash -f -p 0 gtomod.bin

after you put those 2 lines in the text file, save it and then rename it to flash.bat and of course throw that onto the floppy as well

You should now have 5 different files on the floppy, 2 bios's, 2 files from ati flash 3.09 and also the flash.bat file.

That's it now you can go boot to dos and run the flash.bat file and if all goes well you should have a x1800Gto thats able to change all voltages and show temps in AtiTool.

Thanks Goes to Pokey006 and Bgnomes for their help on Getting this all to work.

Last but not least Flash At Your Own Risk!

Have A Nice Day!

Ok, first of all a big Thank You goes to topGear57 for his instructions. After i read lots of good reports about the oc ability of GTO's i got myself AN HIS x1800GTO IceQ 3. I thought this is a good go, since all HIS cards seem to be unlockable and since the IceQ 3 cooler is kickass.

Before modding my bios i had absolutely no succes in overclocking. Since i did what Topgear said i now have controle over the voltage and stuff in Ati tools. However, I can't seem to be able to go over 600 on the core and 614 on the memory. Increasing the Vcore over 1.2V causes crash/freeze, and no matter how much Volt i throw at the mem, i cant get it being stable higher than 614Mhz.

However, with everything at default i had 69xx points in 3dmark, unlocking the pipes got me 74xx and now with 600/614 @ 16 Pipes with 1.75v and 2.1v/2.1v i get 8468 in 3d Mark. However, artifacts appear every now an then (Let alone ATI Tools artifact scanner, who goes crazy when scanning for artifacts..

Does anyone know how i can get it higher than this? It seems that HIS cards in generall , although having a IceQ cooler, suck at overclocking but have the ability to unlock. I mean, there are people running their GTOs at 800/800
Worst thing is, I don't even have a heat issue, the card is cool enough.

I think buying a HIS card was a fault

 

[Jacobman]

Alright i have a HIS x1800gto on the way, after i get everything going and do some stock tests/ gameplay cause its so fast i will possibly attempt this unlocking, but i must read through this whole thread but thought id say this.

EDIT- Doh! Just read all the pages and see that the later ones arent having as much luck, well then i wont try anything except overclocking till i have enough money to buy another incase of a major meltdown.

 

[Vipe]

EDIT- Doh! Just read all the pages and see that the later ones arent having as much luck, well then i wont try anything except overclocking till i have enough money to buy another incase of a major meltdown.

Dude, that doesn't make much sense. You'll rather burn your card by overclocking it than by unlocking the extra pipelines, which most likely will work on your Card since it is a HIS. like I said, unlocking was a breeze, but OCing is rather unrewarding on the HIS cards.

BUT: http://sg.vr-zone.com/?i=3624&s=6

They OC'd a HIS GTO up to 730/730 Notice:

[HIS X1800GTO IceQ 3 Review + Unlocking ]
Page Title: Unlocking the Extra 4 Pipes
Category: GPUs & Graphic Cards
Type: Reviews
Posted By: Shamino
Date: May 8, 2006, 3:29 pm
Source: HIS
Actions: Print Article




Next, I tried to unlock the card by flashing a X1800XL BIOS into the card. With ATi WinFlash 1.08, I successfully unlocked the HIS X1800GTO to 16 pipelines with a flash of SAPPHIRE X1800XL BIOS.



You can see that performance is boosted by 8% with the additional 4 pipelines, even though the X1800XL core speed is 20MHz slower.

There was a drawback that came with the unlocking however. The clock speeds on both the core and memory could no longer hit as high a speed as it used to, no matter what voltages were thrown at it.

Maybe i'll revert to default bios, but I already tried it in the beggining when my card was newly installed and had no succes with riavtuner

 

[TopGear57]

Vipe, you appear to be a victim of the infamous voltage bug as people would like to call it, alot of gto's have this problem including mine, also alot of x1800xl's also have this problem, however most people with HIS brand have not had this problem to my knowledge. I haven't seen anyone who has found a way to get around this problem yet. Alot of people have talked about having the same problem over at xtreme systems gto and xl threads.

http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?t=94602&page=12

http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?t=78054&page=12


However at least for me my memory overclocks quite nicely, its just my core that has the bug.

 

[Vipe]

Ok I have tried everything and nothing seems to help. I cannot get my card higher than 600/610 no matter what I do. At least I get 8500 points in 3Dmark 05, which isn't too bad considering the initial 6900, i guess.

However, with the IceQ 3 Cooler on the card, it's a pitty having to stick with such low frequencies. It's like having a sports car with 300HP that doesn't go faster than 120km/h .

I'm thinking of selling it on ebay now, and getting myself a Sapphire x1800XT 256mb, which costs barely more than a GTO

 

[Jacobman]

Alright my HIS x1800gto came in and newegg sent me the one with the IceQ 3 cooler, not sure if its worth rma'ing to get the non IceQ 3 cooler, but anyways. I took the red sticker off the back and it said x1800xl, so am i able to flash? Cant do anything right now cause only half my order came in!!!! So i have to wait till monday for the PSU and ram.

 

[Vipe]

99% you can flash it. But please, when your sys is complete, please post here some OCing results. I wonder if it is just me who cant get it high on MHz

 

[Douken]

Topgear57, your links on the 1st post don't work

 

[Jacobman]

WOOT!!! Just unlocked it to 16pipes, 1.2v, 500core 500mem. Cant wait to overclock and see what i get.

**EDIT** WOOT!!! 600core 600mem and i now am getting 8301 in 05!!

 

[chron]

jacob, congrats. Once you start messin with voltages to raise the clocks though, your going to see alot of heat. My suggestion is to replace the IceQ cooler with a VF1-Plus and stick some ram sinks on the voltage regulators AND stick a case fan overtop of it.