Radeon 8500 (retail) Voltage Mod For The Schematically Challenged

Visual aids for a voltage mod –Joel D.

Caution: I am only relaying this information to you and as such am not forcing you to take any action. This is a do at your own risk situation. So in other words, don’t blame me if you fry your card.

Special thanks to X-bit labs for the information on the voltage mod (you guys rock!)

Welcome to the Radeon 8500 Voltage Mod Guide for the “Less Intelligent”!

In this guide I will show you how to mod a Radeon 8500 without all of the confusing R1’s, Vcores and electrical theory mumbo jumbo. Yes, this is strictly for you visual people, which accounts for about 80% of the population. So lets get started shall we?

First off here is a list of some things that you will need:

1. Small piece of wire
2. Something sharp
3. Solder (electronics solder)
4. Soldering iron (smaller tip the better)
5. 2X 10K ohm resistors
6. 2X 2.7K ohm resistors
7. Electrical tape
8. Crazy glue of some sort (no metal ingredients)
9. GPU water block or heat sink
10. RAM water blocks or heat sinks

Once you have all the items in the list, it is usually a good idea to remove the GPU heat sink first. This can be done with a credit card and a knife. Simply slip the credit card in between the GPU and the heat sink and then stick a butter knife (or flat head screwdriver).

In-between the credit card and the heat sink, now twist and it should just pop off. If it does not pop off, then just stick it in the freezer for about 20 minutes and try again.

The most important part of the whole voltage mod would be shorting three little pins on that big chip located on the front upper right hand corner of your card.

On the top you will see pin numbers 1 through 10; 4,5 and 7 must be shorted. This may sound difficult, but if you take the right precautions it is no big deal at all. First, to protect the other pins I suggest putting electrical tape on the pins that are not to be soldered, so this way the wire will not stick to the wrong pins.

Now for the actual mod, take a 2-cm piece of multi-strand wire and bare both ends. Coat the ends with solder but don’t make them dripping with solder – you only want enough to fill the wire.

Now take one end and place it in between pins 4 and 5, heat it up, let it cool and it should now be stuck to pins 4 and five. Now bend the wire, place the other end on pin 7 and repeat what you did for pins 4 and 5. Once you remove the electrical tape, you should now have something similar to the picture above.

Now it’s time to pick up one of the 10K ohm resistors and locate the spot that looks like this on the backside on the upper left corner of the card:

Once again, it is probably wise to put electrical tape around the areas that you don’t want soldered. To prepare the resistor, simply bend the ends till it fits snug to the resistor, then tip the ends with solder. Again, try not to put a big gob on the ends. To make things easier, I would suggest that you glue the resistor in place, as I have.

This makes sure the resistor doesn’t move anywhere when you’re trying to solder it. To solder it into place, just repeat what you did before, heat up and let cool. Once you’ve done that to both sides, then it should be solidly in place and you can remove the electrical tape.

For our third mod, pick up the second 10K ohm resistor and locate the area in which to solder it:

This spot is located on the backside of the card at the top center, after the last memory chip. As you can see, it is the same thing as the mod before, so just repeat the steps.

For the fourth mod find a 2.7Kohm resistor:

This is located near the upper right of the backside of the card. Once again, repeat steps from the previous mod.

The fifth and final mod also uses a 2.7K ohm resistor:

This spot is located just to the left of our last mod. Be careful with this one! It is a little bit tricky to see in the picture, but within that red circle there is an unsoldered point and a soldered point. Make sure you connect the resistor to the soldered point.

You can see the soldered point just to the right of the circle and you can see the unsoldered point just to the left. Once you have this figured out, simply repeat the steps in the last mods and you’re done.

Now in order to overclock any you will definitely want to add more cooling. I did water cooling, but you can do air cooling as well. To deal with the amount of extra heat that this mod will put out, I suggest a socket A class cooler and at least Pentium I class heat sinks for the memory.

To attach them, simply use Arctic Silver epoxy or just thermal grease and some super glue on the corners of the chip. This goes for memory and GPU.

To overclock the card, you may find that most programs will only let you overclock so far. So here is a mod for power strip:

Step 1: Make sure Powerstrip is not running;

Step 2: Go into your Powerstrip folder and find the file called Pstrip.ini;

Step 3: Find the setting called DefaultClocks and change the numbers in the column to whatever settings you want to be as default. (i.e. 80043 = 80.043 MHz). There will be 2 numbers and the first one is usually core and the second memory. (eg. 300034,300034 = 300 MHz core and 300 MHz mem). If you have sync clock on, there will be only 1 number. For instance, this is a screen shot of what it looks like with a RageIIc:

With all of this, I am able to hit 340 core and 700 mem – I would be glad to hear what you can get! If you have any questions or just want to discuss this, you can contact me in the Overclockers forum (name: Default) or contact me through e-mail.

Default AKA Joel D.

Note: This “Default” is not the same person who wrote earlier articles, John B. Abaray.