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

selling these

[SnAzBaZ]

Would it be illegal for people to modify these 9500's then sell them on somewhere like eBay for example? You could probably make a killing.

The DMCA has nothing to do with this.

[KPU]

The DMCA is a Copyright Act. It makes circumvention of protected copyrighted works. What copy protection scheme does this mod allow us to circumvent? Of course, blaming the DMCA for everything is always acceptable.

Word to the Wary

[Azerphale]

Note that this only applies to the 9500 and not the 9500 PRO.

This hack has been crawling around the boards for a while and it seems fairly legit. The basic layout and architecture of the 9500 and 9700 are the same and this hack attempts to:
1) Re-enable the extra pixel pipelines that are present on the 9500 just not enable. A simple resister swap near the gpu is required.
2) Flash the bios of the 9500 with a 9700 bios image.
3) Overclock the 9500's core clock to compete with 9700.
4) (Optional) Add more memory.

The biggest problem I see is that the stock memory on the 9500 is of a cheaper variety and isn't rated for the frequency that a 9700 operates at.

So, even if you indeed have the skills/luck involved to pull off this cute hack, then you'll not necessarily be able to compete with a 9700.

My advice, go with the 9500 Pro. Out of the box it's only a step slower than the 9700 Pro and costs half the coin of a 9700/9700 Pro.

But if you've got a 9500 in your machine and some time/money to spare. Why not see if you can achieve great things with a minimum cost?

Software mod

[muzzynat]

I have a friend that just did the software mod, and that alone nearly doubled his 3D mark. I would have to say with the ease and relative safety of the software mod, its probably best not to get greedy and kill your card. At least that my opinion. Either way my gForce 3 is starting to feel a little inferior.

Re:Sounds to me like ...

[Minupla]

Not that I don't agree with you in this case, but there have been cases, historically speaking, of companies releasing two models for marketing reasons and finding it cheaper to make a hard coded 'feature switch'. I recall a hard drive of olde that could be upgraded to twice the size. The engineers designed a drive. Marketing decided they needed one half the size too. It was cheaper and faster to do a mode switch then it was to pay the extra engineering and manufactering costs to build a second model of HDD.

See also the 'flippy discs' of the C-64 era. It was cheaper/easier for companies to use the double sided media they used on other systems, then produce new single sided floppies just for the c-64 market. You punched a second hole in the floppy, and turn it over.

Again, I don't argue that's what ATI is doing here. I personally agree with the person above who suggested they're probably using 'bin chips' that for some reason didn't make the cut for the 9700 boards.

So you pays your monies and you takes your chances. Mmmm I love the smell of newbies with solder suckers in the morning :). As for me, I know my skills do not extend into the land of hot insterments of destruction, so I'll take a pass :)