Getting a Radeon 9700 Pro with a Radeon 9500np

bungee

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Jul 7, 2001
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Hi everybody!
I just bought a Radeon 9500 non-pro card on eBay and modified it to get a Radeon 9700 pro card. I first reenabled the 8 pixel pipelines and the overclocked the core and memory to the values of a 9700 pro. It's working great.
This is the process of softmodding.
http://www.ocfaq.com/softmod/faq.php
http://reviews.designtechnica.com/guide13.html
I had corrupted screen, but using Rage 3D tweak, I have been able to reduce the Z-Compression to "low" which removed some of the artifact. Highering the AGP voltage in the BIOS removed the chessboard/checkerboard effect. Now it is working flawlessly. :)
I know the specific R9500 card with L shaped memory (=256bit) are hard to find, but on eBay, some are still available so check this out!

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scottchen

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This is kinda old news, but thx for letting everybody know there's still a chance to let everybody know they could buy a crappy card and mod it into something nice(did i forget to mention the 50% success rate?)

-Intel PIV 2.6C @ 3.276G -Asus P4P800 -OCZ Copper 4x256 4000EL memory @ 252mhz 2.5-3-4-6 -XFX 5900 128meg 570/1040 -SB audigy -2x120G Seagate 7200.7 S-ATA150 hdd -450 Enermax PSU
 

bungee

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I know it's old news. What I think is new is the way to remove the artifacts. For those who failed the softmod, they can try it. Anyway, my card destroys the brand new 9600XT and I'm happy! :eek:D

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scottchen

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Have you done some benchmarks?

-Intel PIV 2.6C @ 3.276G -Asus P4P800 -OCZ Copper 4x256 4000EL memory @ 252mhz 2.5-3-4-6 -XFX 5900 128meg 570/1040 -SB audigy -2x120G Seagate 7200.7 S-ATA150 hdd -450 Enermax PSU
 

bungee

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Of course. The only thing is that my cpu is a serious bottleneck: its a TBird 1200. The VGA charts of Toms teaches us that Athlon 1000 is a bottleneck for videocards. See
http://www6.tomshardware.com/graphic/20030120/vgacharts-05.html
Having said this, here are some numbers:
3DMark2001SE
Radeon 64DDR VIVO: 3223 3dmarks
Radeon 9500 : 8024
Radeon 9700 (not o/c, only softmodded): 8678

3Dmark03
Radeon 9500: 2587
Radeon 9700 (not o/c): 3781
Radeon 9700 ~Pro (Core324MHz Mem300MHz) : 3892

It is that last configuration that I kept and it is rock solid. Other articles said that I could o/c more the core compensating for lower Mem than Pro, but I will stick within R9700Pro specs range. There is obviously a big increase in 3DMark 2003 between R9500 and R9700o/c...

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scottchen

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Jun 3, 2003
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That's pretty good, but yeah, the rest of your system, does kinda suck.

-Intel PIV 2.6C @ 3.276G -Asus P4P800 -OCZ Copper 4x256 4000EL memory @ 252mhz 2.5-3-4-6 -XFX 5900 128meg 570/1040 -SB audigy -2x120G Seagate 7200.7 S-ATA150 hdd -450 Enermax PSU