How to change your Radeon 9500 into a 9700

Posted by CmdrTaco on Sunday January 19, 2003 @04:05AM from the some-elbow-work-required dept.

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."

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Read other fora before attempting ... by HalfFlat · 2003-01-19 04:17 · Score: 5, Informative

This mod and its possible failure modes have been discussed on the rage3d forums.

It seems the best theory as to why some checkerboard and some do not, is that the 9500 uses binned chips, where not all eight texture pipelines necessarily operate correctly at normal speeds, voltages, or possibly at all.

The mod apparently works by unlocking or changing a hard-wired ID field, which then allows the 9700 bios to be used on the 9500 board.