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 not a good idea.

[Krapangor]

If you enable features on your card which have been disabled by the company you might run into serious trouble. These days graphics cards are very thightly designed in terms of heat and EMV distribution. Any significant change at the configuration might disbalance this unstable equilibrium.
It's a well known problem in EE design that this disbalancing might result in unstable, chaotic behavior. This is particulary problematic because the basic design of most electric circuit contains a large Kalman-Barsharotiwz feedback filter. Together with the missing stability this creates an undamped increasing oszillation which will basically blow up your entire set up. EE PhD's will surely known this as the Lillehammer effect.

So the only conclusion can be: Keep your hands off, bugger !