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."

Comments

This is getting to be a little too much...

[puto]

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

Re:One for the price of two

[Anonymous Coward]

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)