9500 & 9500 Pro

[veryloco]

Is there a difference between a Radeon 9500 with 128 MB of mem and a 9500 Pro? Thanks

 

[cleeve]

The 9500 PRO has 8 pixel pipelines, just like the 9700 PRO.

The 9500 non-pro is a 9500 PRO chip that has been gibbled by disabling 4 of the 8 pixel pipelines.
A 9500 non-pro has only 4 pipelines. It's alot slower... more like a Radeon 8500 as far as rendering power goes.

To complicate matters, there are mods out there that can enable those 4 pipelines on a 9500 non-pro to turn it into a 9500 PRO! But the problem is it doesn't work all of the time. The failure rate is between 25% and 75%, no one knows for sure.

The safe thing to do is get the 9500 PRO.
It's an amazing card for the price.

 

[daddywags214]

I second that. The idea of saving money by getting a nonpro and modding it to become a Pro is appealing, but too dangerous with a $200 purchase.

I'm a born barbershopper...

 

[rubikian]

The non-pro performance is worse than the Ti4200...

 

[veryloco]

What about a patch I heard about called Soft9700? It seems to do the same as modding but be in a software format. Has anyone used this and have they had good results?

 

[cleeve]

Lots of people have tried it with success. If you wnat to talk to lots of Radeon tweakers the mforums at rage3d.com are full of Radeon people.

The soft tweak still can't mod a 9500 non-pro with a 128 bit memory bus to a 9700, though. It can mod it to a 9500 PRO, however.
The somftmod failure rate is the same as the hardware failure rate, so keep that in mind!

- Cleeve