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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."
I thought that. Bugger up the original card, and you then have to go buy a replacement - so you either pay twice and end up with 1 working card, or pay even more the second time, get the performance you wanted from the mod, but for much more than the face price. Modding like this is a bit over the top. There's being economical, and then there's just being plain tight.
You know I have been tinkering with computer equipment since HeathKit. Yep, OLD SKOOl, bread boarding and soldering, and learned a great deal by doing it.
I love the hacker ethic, kludge something until it works. Sometimes you have to, sometimes you want to, and sometimes just for the hell of it.
I understand trying to save a few bucks, but COME ON PEOPLE.
What I am seeing more and more is these whack hardware hacks which 20% of the time do increase the hardware potential and the 80% fry whatever you are fooling with. So you clean the part of real good, RMA it, and get a new one. Screwing the rest of the world in the process cause you wanted to hack it.
I remember in the day of the Celeron 300A, I was working in a shop that sold them hand over fist. And we got them back hand over fist due to over clockers"Dunna what happened man, just didn't work one day, I didn't over clock it though, musta been defective"
You futz up the graphic card, clean the solder off, and bring it back to Best Buy. They don't look it, they just give you another, and prices go up.
But everyone doesn't take that into account when they bring it back.
I don;t have unlimited funds, but I know you get what you pay for.
People that buy that Athlon 1800, cheap ass board, cheap ass fan, cheap ass power supply, overclock it, then spend 200 bucks on cooling, which could have applied to just buying a better cheap, board, and power supply.
And what scares me is this is the next generation of admins. I see the result now in the field. Some young computer whiz has outfitted an entire office with no name stuff, only a years guarantee, then he quits, six months later stuff starts to go out. And I have to tell them they have to buy new stuff cause they nearly new stuff was crap.
So I ask the community this. If you mod it and fry it. Throw it in the garbage, dont make me pay by bringing it back or RMA ing New Egg. But howsa about this. If it ain't broke. Don't fuck with it.
Puto
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
No.. as long as you didn't pretend it was a 9700. You have the right to re-sell it however you want.
However.. that doesn't mean that ATI won't find some bullshit reason to sue you and throw confusion on the whole issue to make you look like a bad guy. (presuming you are in America, where this kind of things is all so common)
Remember when US Robotics had a fit becase they were selling their Dual Standard modems at twice the price of their Sporster (single standard), yet using the same board/chipset? Someone published an init string that would enable dual mode on the sporster.... and ATI had a fit, trying to say it was copyrigh violation, illegal, etcetera.
No, it's not stealing. For it to be stealing, you would have to take something without the owner's consent. As it is, you're simply depriving them of money you _otherwise_ might have given them, had you not known how to turn a 9500 into a 9700. That's not theft at all.
Maybe ATi could argue that they're entitled to the money - that these people are enjoying the benefits of owning a 9700 card without having paid for one. But they haven't _stolen_ it, they've simply obtained the benefits by unconventional means. AFAIK there's no law against upgrading and overclocking; maybe there was something in the EULA for the drivers, but apart from that there's no problem.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
The DMCA is a Copyright Act. It makes circumvention of protected copyrighted works. What copy protection scheme does this mod allow us to circumvent?
Since this mod apparently requires you to flash the 9500 with the 9700 firmware, you would at very least be violating copyright on the 9700 firmware. Unless, of course, you somehow paid for a copy of the 9700 firmware. The only way I know to do that would be to buy a 9700, and not actually use it.
Not quite. Most of these 9500 to 9700 articles fail to mention that there is a very good chance that one of the four extra pipelines will be defective. To increase the yield rate, many 9700 boards (the board used on the Sapphire 9500) with defective pipelines are made to use four of the working pipelines in 128 bit memory/4 pipeline mode with microcode. Other defects that don't affect the the card in 9500 mode are also possible. So when you pay $160 for your 9500 you might just get what you paid for. (Yay for RMAs)
Also, it can be a good way to make use of parts which are out-of-spec for the higher performance version.
sPh