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How to change your Radeon 9500 into a 9700
Ian Bell writes "We have just posted a very difficult guide to turning your ATI Radeon 9500 into a 9700. But you have to have the correct 9500. A 9500 with 4 rendering pipelines, modified to enable all 8 pipelines, will effectively double the memory bus, if you have the extra 64 Meg of memory to attach it to. We will explain below which card to acquire for this awesome graphics card transformation. Check out how to do this yourself and get the power of a 9700 at half the price." Update: 01/19 18:33 GMT by T : And for those running Windows, Sanity writes "Aside from the hardware mod, there is a program called Riva Tuner that has, among other things, a software mod for unlocking those gates, plus overclocking to a full 9700 pro! Gives me more $$$ to spend on cool stuff."
This seems like a really good way to have to buy two graphics cards.
Dunno about the guide for modding video cards but they should have used one for they webserver, already /.ted :/
DMCA've killed Kenny!
Any significant change at the configuration might disbalance this unstable equilibrium.
...which leads to an inversely proportional reaction in the chamber injectors causing a core breach?
;)
-- El Sacarino tiene gusto de la chocha
I just think the person who took the shots showing a burned copy of a game was idiotic enough... Sides, Radion sucks :P
The one thing that bothers me is the "Turn your 9500 into a 9700" that's not really true, see a 9700 was meant to run like a 9700 and a 9500 is meant to run like a 9500, this will be more or less a memory/speed upgrade for a 9500.
I seriously doubt that ATI would try to keep the market inflated by purposefully dumbing down a high end card, this sort of thing doesn't happen in real life. It's not like Intel has ever used a pIII chip with the cache disabled/ripped out for celerons before. I mean jeeze people why would a hardware company want to make something intentionally slower, it's not as if 3 steps from the top cards cost nearly 200% less. Next someone is going to tell me it costs roughly $18 to manufacture a Radeon 9700. I tell you, it's all lies, all lies.
Ignore the "p2p is theft" trolls, they're just uninformed
I figure that the lost profits from people who buy a 9500 instead of a 9700 will be more the compensated for by the folks who mung the mod up and have to go buy another video card.
Heck, I wouldn't be surprised if ATI leaked this mod in the first place. Just think of all the money they save on voided warrantys alone. Not to mention tech support...
"Hello, ATI technical support. Can I help you?"
"Yeah, I have a problem with my video card. It keeps locking up"
"I see... what kind of card is it?"
"Well, it's a 9500, but I modded it so that..."
*click*
I am NOT a man!
I am a free number!
Yeah, I remember that.. whooo boy, that was a mess. To this date I still have no clue why ATI went nuts for people hacking USR modems, but there doesn't need to be a reason. :)
Johansen vs Mitsu knives. The customer had purchased a steak knife and was caught slicing bread with it...
FRA: STFU GTFO
Actually, this will work to convert ANY card into a 9700 - simply take the card (no matter how old) and jam your soldering gun into it, go to CompUSA and buy a 9700. Easy as that!
make it perform the same as a Radeon DDR
For me, DDR performs perfectly well even with an old beat-up TNT2.
Will I retire or break 10K?
</sarcasm>
today is spelling optional day.
I tried this on my old-skool 32mb radeon. It exploded. Is that bad? Morrowind did run smooth for .0000001 seconds, though.
Very clever trick, but we all know where this is going:
In Soviet Russia, ATI Radeon 9700 can be turned into a 9500 with just a simple hack.