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.

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.