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Turning A FX5900 Into A FX5950 Ultra, Tool-Free
A reader writes "Some very interesting details coming from various tech sites such as ExplosiveLabs and 3DChips that shows it is possible to turn a GeForce FX5900 into a FX5950 Ultra (which is NVIDIA's top of the line video card chipset currently available) through simply using the FX5950 Ultra BIOS on the FX5900 video card."
It's the Quadro all over again!
Why do businesses sell underclocked hardware when they know some geek somewhere is going to try loading the higher software in and seeing what happens? If that test comes back positive and can be duplicated... we'll be reading it here on /.
.. of an ATI card costing half as much?
What is the net effect of this? A couple extra FPS? What game really needs this?
Most Radeon 9800 Non-Pros will accept a 9800 Pro BIOS, You can have ATI's top of the line for $200 - $250.
Based on the 3DLabs article, I'd be concerned that this is a situation like what happened with the Intel 486DX/SX. i.e. The chips that test better are marked as DX and the chips that have minor flaws are downgraded and marked SX. Installing the upgrade BIOS may put a strain on your chip that could damage it.
Basically, if you do this, don't be surprised if your card becomes toast a shortwhile after.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
so is this another case of the consumer getting ripped off or does the higher end card use better quality, higher tolerance components and so the price differential is justified ?
If I'm not mistaken, why would you even want a fx5900 in the first place? ATI is trouncing all over NVIDIA. Personally, wouldn't it make more sense to find out all the possibilities of tweaking Radeons?
Then they'll fix things like AMD now locking the Barton CPU's. Sure, you can still OC via the bus speed, but now the multiplier is locked.
Is anyone else reminded of those virus programs that claimed to magically make your 386 a 486? Do you really think the BIOS is the only difference between the two cards?
might take more than a bios update though ;)
Note to manufacturers: Stop creating products that feature factures. Got it. good.
It's not clear to me that this does anything other than change the text string containing the name of the card. It seems under some conditions people get better overclocking, but that could easily be due to room temperatures and the like. Are there any particular features in the 5950 not present in the 5900?
For great justice.
Will it turn my 5950 into one of those sweet 288MB Wildcat cards from 3DLabs? That would be worth the risk.
FYI, that "animal" is a mare.
That's great!!! :)
anyone read the full forum posting and see that the q3a framerate dropped, along with some other things?
I can just see it, Nvidia Board Meeting:
Okay, I've been to this site, slashdot.org, and they have some radical ideas about business plans, but I think they have something we can use. It's called the ? plan, and always ends in profit. See, here's ours:
1. Release Underclocked Card
2. Release NEW and IMPROVED card, costing more money!
3. Piss off people with NEW and IMPROVED card when they find out Underclocked card can have new bios, being just as good as NEW and IMPROVED card.
4. People who pay more for NEW and IMPROVED card don't buy any more NEW and IMPROVED cards.
5. ???????
6. Profit!!!!!!!!!!
Since when has this country used intellectual elite as a pejorative term?
-This is your bin-sorted video card.
-This is your overclocked bin-sorted video card catastrophically failing.
Any questions?
Its not uncommon to find out that your chipsets and or system exceed its book specs. If this is the case a company has 4 options
1)Drop the earlier product
2)Keep selling the product as is (unused potential)
3)Sell both drop the price of the first one
4)Sell both keep the old one the same price introduce the new one at a higher price.
In the GA marketplace can you blame them for chosing the path they did? Besides they aren't getting the same the new card peforms better even if it is only because of the bios.
Bad Panda! No Bamboo for you! In matters of importance ACs will not be responded to. Want to say something critical,OK
I think you're right, they seem to be basing the fact that it's an "Ultra" completely off the fact that the Windows control panel says "NVIDIA GeForce FX 5950 Ultra". The people on the message board post benchmarks, and they're all lower save for one - you can overclock the card slightly higher when it's running the Ultra's bios... w00t.
Poor sales figures for the FX950 because people are buying a cheaper one instead? Simply post a way for people to easily fry their cheaper card so they can then upgrade to the better one!
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
did i miss something, or are those benchmarks showing the "upgraded" bios is actually making the card run slower if they don't overclock even further?
I received my ATI Radeon 9700 Pro today (though it's not yet installed). I did all kinds of reading about these cards and was so close to buying another Nvidia, but it just doesn't look like they're competing on the levels that ATI's cards can go. Plus, I was a bit put off by their marketing schemes - it happens all over the place, but the GeForce 4 MX series isn't much more than a glorified GeForce 2. It's not as powerful as the GeForce 3 - but it's cheaper. So I suppose I'm not surprised by the news that they would cut corners to make a bit more money. A software/firmware upgrade that makes my card faster? I'll take it. Buying the same card with that upgrade installed for even more money? Screw off.
Then again, AMD does sorta the same thing with their numbering in order to counter Intel's "gigahertz means better" campaigns.
It makes less difference than that, there isn't even ONE game out there which gains any sort of benefit from the past THREE generations of cards from both ati and nvidia.
;)
Yes the cards are faster, but they already rendered the game at perfect speed 3 generations ago. A Geforce 4 will run any game out there perfectly... won't hold up in the benchmarks but you won't get a single visible frame faster performance on any actual game with a radeon 9800 pro
pot kettle black
God I wish people would get off there "I want everything for free" High around here..
The people who bought a FX5950 Ultra payed more for a card rated to work at higher speeds, For a warrenty that will still be valid if there card fails due to normal reasons.
They paided more because they choose to do so.
Tommorow someones going to complain that a version of quickbooks pro can be upgraded to quickbooks business with a simple crack, and that is just not fair to the people who spent real money on quickbooks business.
Or.. The diamond ring my friend bought is exactly the same as mine, but I paided more.. Its just wrong.. How dare stores charge diffrent prices.
Windows 2003 Can support unlimited users, But you pay for it. Its the exact same software regardless. How dare microsoft expect you to pay for such a thing.
Personal Website
More likely, NVidia bins its chips like all other hardware manufacturers. Cards are manufactured to be the same, and are then stress-tested. Those that make the cut are shipped out at the highest speed, those that don't get underclocked. Sure, you can clock a 5900 back up, but the chances of failure are much higher than with a real 5950 Ultra.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
I have a Chaintech GeForce FX5950, and I love it. I don't care if someone can flash their card to upgrade it. But I also realize that like all processors they are binned, and as such - my own card runs a bit cooler in the end.
You don't play many games, do you shaitland? Go play Battlefield 1942 at 1600 x 1200 with full performance and full AA and AS with any GeForce card, and then run it with the 9800. Trust me, HUGE difference.
the only difference between these two cards is the ultra is clocked higher. how does the flashing/etc result in an advantage beyond overclocking your card? It changes how windows/bios recognize the card? whoop de doo.
Nvidia did this a long time ago with the tnt line. i still have my tnt ultra (bought used, thanks).
I believe I hear the DMCA police coming.
Seriously, I wouldn't be surprised if they whipped out the DMCA threatening letters for this.
_______
2B1ASK1
What resolution do you run at? I game at 1280x1024 all options turned up to the max. I can assure you that my FX5900 is a marked improvement over my TI4600. Before that I had an ATI AIW8500DV - but that card was a piece. I still have my ATI AIW128Pro 32mb AGP doing a nice job on capture. Old hardware can be usefull, but everything has it's place.
How about voting for none of the above?
... ..
.. .
.
Actually quake3's fps are lower with the other cards bios.
Only it's frequency is pushed higher, so you get LOWER PERFORMANCE at HIGHER EXPLOSION RISK. Cool.
.
. .
This is true to a point - but the faster cards handle higher resolutions at good frame-rates before choking on all the pixels streaming through them. On the high end cards like the Radeon 9800XT, the system bus often gets saturated before the card itself is maxxed out (when gaming at some resolution like 1600x1280).
If you're one of the majority of people who see no real reason to play games at resolutions above 1024x768, then yeah - anything since a GeForce 2 is probably plenty fast enough to make all the games "playable".
The huge resolutions only start making sense when you use really large monitors (which some people are starting to do nowdays). In fact, this is one reason I think the Apple Mac was getting left out of most of the gaming marketplace for so long. Until recently, they didn't really offer any high end 3D cards for their PowerMac line, but at the same time, were much more likely than most PC users to have a large Cinema display running natively at a high resolution.
Oh well. You can't have everything. But imagine the possiblities, posting this as IMG URSs to message boards. Too bad I can't get this into "a href=..."
So does this just make overclocking easier, or does it turn on other features? I ask because the 'professional' cards (i.e. the kind use 3D artists would benefit from) have acellerated wireframe drawing and the like. Is that the case here too, or is it just a few extra FPS in Quake?
"Derp de derp."
That was exactly what the ExplosiveLabs post said.
I don't have a problem if they're sorting parts by tolerances. I don't even mind the OC options. I just wish they'd be a little clearer what is what!
They have two or three variants of about four basic model numbers. But which is faster? (especially if tthe fastest isn't an option).
Why can't they label them like CPUs (well, CPUs prior to the current "Athlon 64 128 DL-740 Edition"-- NV31 core, 235 core, 400 memory, instead of "5300 Super Zap Wowee edition"
It's just like a fascist dictatorship, without the punctual rail service!
I don't mean to sound negative, but why does slashdot always come to news like this 3 or 4 months late? I'm an avid poster over at hardforums.com and this is really old news. This bios flash has been common knowledge to [H]ardcore enthusiasts since the prices dropped on 5900 non-ultras around the 5700ultra release a few months ago...
-dewhite
Now, will someone please figure out how to quadroize the GeForce4 cards? They cost a hundred bucks, it would be bloody fantastic.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
It is just the rules of supply and demand... if a set of consumers are willing to pay a higher price for some hardware, why not charge them that price?. I would if I was making graphic cards. The fact is that most 80% of consumers are not going to flash thir bioses because they don't know how. That saves NVidia dev costs, it immediately voids the warranty on the card so NVidia can make money that way, and a large quantity of the BIOS flashes may fail - no warranty refund in that case and the consumer has to go and buy another. Its win-win for NVidia as far as I can see. The slashdot/hax0r crowd see a way of getting something for nothing - NVidia aren't stupid and are aware that thye won't lose as much $$$ as we think they will.
I see the previous poster hasn't been playing Halo lately. A DX9 capable card makes a world of difference there, and high end cards (9800 vs 9600) do as well if you're trying to play at upper resolutions. 800 x 600 on a 21 inch monitor doens't cut it.
Probably a few other people are doing this right now, too. There are some differences in the profile, but I'm not sure yet if they are actual hardware differences or differences in the way the bios uses the hardware.
It will certainly be interesting to see when I, or somebody else, does figure that out.
I guess I'll expand on this since most people won't have a clue about it.
Cg, the shader programming language that nvidia put out, has profiles for different cards and functionality sets. Depending on how you code your stuff, it's like a JIT compiler that optimizes for the current video card driver. Those profiles are different. That might be because of the way the GPU is used is different, or it might be because there are different wirings within the core. I suppose I could rip open the boxes and see if the numbers printed on the chips are the same, but I'm not that kind of hardware geek. :-)
frob
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement
Stop creating products that feature factures.
Huh?
This is NOT a true geforce fx 5950, IIRC the 5950 also has hardware support for floating point shaders, which, IIRC the 5900 does NOT have, (it only has integery support, similar to the the 5600/5700 scenario)
You are wrong.
A friend of mine just upgraded from a Ti4200 when we noticed that in most new games nvidia cards were having pitiful performance--most notably in Call of duty, notably, in the now somewhat old Command and Conquer Generals, Geforce cards seemed to arbitrarily run pathetically slow--to the point that if any Geforce powered machine dropped out, lag was reduced for all players involved instantly
If you can't see the value in jet powered ants you should turn in your nerd card. - Dunbal (464142)
Ali G. What is that all about? Is it good or is it whack?
I guess you never played Morrowind. 12 frames per second is not what I would call running "perfectly" but that is what you get with a Geforce 4 running around Balmora in the rain. Today I'm happy to get 20 frames per second with my Geforce 5 but there is still a lot of room for improvement.
Before we get into the hack itself, we need to look at the chips and BIOSes involved. The 5900 cards use the NV35 chipset, and the 5950 uses the NV38 chipset. The two chips are very similar, but they are not exactly the same. This is not the Radeon 9500 to 9700 hack. In that situation, you had an R300 in both cards--here, you have to very similar chips. The differences between the NV35 and the NV38 are slight, at best, and as far as anyone knows, they have more to do with the cost of manufacturing than anything else (I've heard that 5900 cards are so cheap now simply because they are being dumped in lieux of 5950s).
So, where does that leave us? The BIOS hack. Essentially, it does three things to the best of anyone's knowledge:
So, the decrease in performance at the same clock speeds is due to the relaxed memory timings, but just like with anything else, you can get a higher overclock as a result.
HOWEVER--there is one potentially serious problem. Most people have reported that the 5950 BIOS flash has caused no change in the reported temperatures. Given what we know about the new BIOS and increased voltage, this makes no sense. I am, then, forced to wonder if the temperature diode becomes less accurate after the BIOS is flashed with the 5950 BIOS. No one has confirmed this, and since I don't have a 5900 to try it on, I can't either. However, it's something to keep in mind.
Finally, this is not newsworthy in the least. It's the same as people changing 9800 non-Pro BIOSes to those of 9800 Pros and getting better memory overclocks. It's nothing special or magical; you're not doubling the number of pipelines and the memory bus like you were with the 9500 to 9700 hack. However, it works (or seems to, at least), and it's pretty cool.
---
nV News
Next you're going to tell me my frame rates will go DOWN a whopping 2%!
"---Original BIOS---
FX5900 @ 475Mhz/950Mhz DDR (Overclocked to FX5950U Speeds)
3DMark03: 5770
---A380U BIOS---
FX5950 @ 475Mhz/950Mhz DDR (Default FX5950U Speeds)
3DMark03: 5661"
Sounds like one mod I can't wait to do...
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
Actually, you got some things wrong. Firstly, the things that determine XP vs MP and Mobile vs Regular aren't jumpers; they're bridges. You have to connect them electronically by means of a pencil or rear window defroster kit.
/overclocker
And, the 2500+ runs default at 1833MHz.
or NVidia will be forced to take the approach AMD did. AMD got tired of newbie overclockers buying $90 XP2500s and easily overclocking them into $500 XP3200s, so they locked the multiplier, one of the methods used to overclock AMD chips.
Thus proving, the many ruin things for the few.
Wow! Thats cool. I wonder then if there is a way to turn my vodoo3 into a Video Card...
- no sig.
Better yet, how about just use the model numbers more clearly.
Wow I just bought this 680BE!
Really, gee sorry skip, but it's actually SLOWER than me year-old 540XP, which you can find for 20 bucks less! Try again!
abbbuh?
Some people will complain about anything. :)
I nominate that the above statement replace "News for nerds, stuff that matters." as the Slashdot motto.
1. Release Underclocked Card
2. Release NEW and IMPROVED card, costing more money!
3. Piss off people with NEW and IMPROVED card when they find out Underclocked card can have new bios, being just as good as NEW and IMPROVED card.
4. People who pay more for NEW and IMPROVED card don't buy any more NEW and IMPROVED cards.
5. ???????
6. Profit!!!!!!!!!!
----
5. Release a new version of the underclocked cards that would fail if upgraded to the bios.
5.5 People who tried to Overclock buys new cards and try their luck again
6. Profit!!!!
yeah... nice idea
What, and throw my vote away?
I found a way to upgrade not just my video card, but my whole PC!
It is right here! ;)
I meant fractures ;)
See what happens with chips is that every chip of a given type comes from the same fabrication process, same wafers. A given design of the P4 (like say the Northwood) ALL comes from the same place, regardless of speed. So, what happens? Does Intel just underclock lots of chips? No. They rate them.
Despite the amazing levels of controls, there are imperfections on silicon wafers, and imperfections in the etching process. Not every chip comes out the same. So when chips come off the wafer, they need to be tested and rated. Some fail outright, the just don't work at all. Those get tossed, or made into keychains or the like. Of the ones that DO work, they are tested for the maximum speed they'll reliably perform at and seperated into bins based on that. So off of a given wafer you can easily have chips that run anywhere from 1ghz to 2ghz and such.
Now, where underclocking comes in is a few cases:
1) Some companies tend to be conservative with their speeds. Intel is one of those. Generally speaking, their chips can really handle more than they claim. Intel is careful, though, and in the one case they weren't (certian 1ghz P3s) they got burned by chips that failed.
2) Sometimes, yeilds are just too good. Like you have a big demand for 1.6ghz chips, but most of what you are making runs at 2ghz or more. No problem, you take some from the 2ghz bin and underclock and mark them as 1.6ghz. They run slower just fine.
3) The chip runs at a higher speed, but has problems. Sometimes a chip will run faster, but parts of it fail to work prpoerly. So while 98% of the chip works fine at 2ghz, 1 unit just won't work past 1.5ghz. Can't really be selling chips that "mostly" work (remember how bad Intel got burne on the Pentiums with the FDIV bug) so it needs to be marked down.
Little real world example:
Back in the day of the Celeron A's, overclocking was real popular. Intel was having just great yeilds on their chips and most of their slow chips would really work much faster. So what you'd do is buy a cheap Celeron 300a, which was designed to run on a 66mhz bus, and run it on a 100mhz bus. This would bump the chip up to 450mhz. Basically, a system like this ran as fast or faster than a PII 450, and cost a hell of a lot less. Me and tons of friends did just this.
Well, the levels of success varied. My roomate at the time had a total and unqualified success. He dropped the chip in and it ran with no tweaking at all. As far as I know, he still has it in an anticillary system today. Basically, his chip was one from the 450mhz (or better) bin that had been marked down to meet demand.
I had less success. Mine I had to boost the voltage by about 20% to make it run stable at 450mhz. This I did and it worked fine... For about a year. Then my system started to have odd instabilities, crashing all over for no apparent reason. Went to the point of unusable in a very short time. The root of the problem was apparent when I had it calculate Pi and it got a slightly wrong answer. My chip was shot, and I had to get a new one. So while my chip could be made to run at 450mhz, it wasn't really capable fo taking it, and the stress eventually destroyed it.
Another friend simply never got it to work. Chip ran fine at 300mhz, but whenever he tried it at 450, the system just wouldn't POST. Tried cranking the voltage and all the tweaks he could think of, to no end. His chip was rated 300 for a reason, that's all it could do.
A similar situation existed with Intel's SX/DX chips. Basically, Intel found that a high number of chips had faulty math coprocessors. Thing was, the main unit worked fine, it was just the FP unit that was faulty. Well rather than throw the whole chip out, they'd just disable the math co and sell it as an SX.
So just because you can hack BIOS/microcode/whatever to make something run faster, doesn't mean it can handle it. Sometimes, it really is a faster chip underclocked, sometimes, it is clocked that speed for a reason. IT's a crapshoot. You also need to be careful since you CAN damage the chip doing it, like I did. No bigge for me, it was a Celeron that cost me like $80 and I got a year of use out of it. Be a much bigger deal if it was a $300 graphics card and you burned it out after a month.
In the case of something like 3dmark, 2% is probably stastically insiginficant. So really, it looks to be no different between just straight overclocking, on this test at least.
The root of the problem was apparent when I had it calculate Pi and it got a slightly wrong answer.
Cool. If you've fixed that problem, the Fields Medal that's in store for you comes with a big-enough cash prize to buy any CPU they sell down at CompUSA.
The parent post could well be correct. In software development, "time to market" is a huge factor. As a result a lot of features get developed without time for proper testing. It's not common to leave untested features in one release of a product which are disabled, test them later when time permits, and enable them as part of the next release. The obvious danger is that if the untested feature contains bugs, then.... doh!
If you have an FX5900 have a license for the FX5900 BIOS, not the FX5950 Ultra BIOS. I'm pretty sure it could be said that you're pirating the BIOS.
And you don't consider blowing it on a shit canidate you is throwing it away? At least if you don't vote as he performs all the evil he will put forth in office you can know you didn't support his being there.
I'm a registered voter. Haven't voted even once so far, but you can be sure the minute there is a candidate that I support I'll be right there voting.
mod parent up kthx
you fail it. mod this fool down.
Eh? I was playing Splinter Cell on my brother's GeForce 4, and I had to turn down from 1280x1024 to 1024x768 to get the frame-rate acceptably smooth.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Thanks for demonstrating your point by using the FX5900 version of English grammar.
AMD's are only labeled like that because AMD has a more efficient processor. Intels can run the same data multiple times and not get the right output, but an AMD can nail it in one shot.
Karma: Good, or bust!
here you are with 700billion people starving in the world just sitting around flaming on slasdot...
Haha. So true.
Aye!
Please stop stalking me, bro.
you wont get 3d hardware support with nvidia. if only apple made a 12" powerbook with nvidia
I recall a site I worked at back in the eighties where we had a certain model of mainframe, and a support contract valued at tens of thousands of dollars a year. We decided to "upgrade" the machine to a higher spec in the same series, and the next time the engineer was onsite for routine maintenance (which was usually every week), he took out his wire cutters and snipped a link on one of the processor boards. Bingo - hardware upgrade! The link was some kind of jumper that imposed certain restricions on the hardware. And yes, there was corresponding increase in the support contract costs too...
My next sig will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush
Then get off the computer and join the fucking Peace Corps.
I wasn't aware that original Pentium chips were ever "sold as ... 33MHz" Thought they started at the Pentium 60 (MHz) ...link?
As for the modifying of frequencies (overclocking) and the like, as enthusiast can testify, this is nothing new. Original ATi Radeon 9500 could be hacked into 9700 pro's which I think a bigger graphics headline than this will be, since the 5950 still barely keeps up with a 9800 Pro XT.
Also, as the parent hinted at, when I was working at a local SoCal white box shop, a few articles came out over at xbitlabs about the AMD Athlon XP thuroughbred cores (_1_ and _2_). I ended up snagging a few and sure enough, if the chip had the right numbers, we could get the as high as 2800+! This, I suppose, was because they didn't pass QA testing for the model number they were intended, and had to be underclocked and sold as lower models. Great for the geeks though! :) Stability was about 99.5%. Yummy.
Keep it up chipzillas so the hackers have more things to tinker with...
Disclaimer: I don't know what I'm talking about.
No! Wow, is turning your ugly girlfriend into a beautiful supermodel.
God I wish people would get off there "I want everything for free" High around here
Why? If I can get something I wish to own for free instead of paying money, in a morally acceptable (to me) manner, I will. So would you.
How dare stores charge diffrent prices.
Your sarcastic statement seems to imply that stores should be free to price their items as they wish, also know as a free capitalist market. So, why shouldn't individuals be free to mod their hardware as they fucking choose? Is your brain in "oh poor victim citizen me, god and government and corporation know better than me" mode? Of course we're going to go for the better deal!
As I recall, the 486SX had more to do with marketing then it did with having a "bad batch of chips". The SX was introduced as a cheaper and lower power alternative to the DX, as AMD was even then starting to gobble up Intel's share on the low end.
http://www.pcmech.com/show/processors/35/2
I'm also a bit surprised at this overall level of shock to something like this; this is normal business proceedure and has been for quite some time.
Tooling an assembly line is expensive; if multiple products can be made on the same line then it has a major impact on a companies bottom line. Besides, most of the money goes into development of a new board, tech support and software development; not production.
Other examples which come to mind:
-Promise Ultra66 vs Fasttrack66 : solder on a resistor and flash the bios.
-Liteon burners going form 40X to 48X to 52X with only a firmware upgrade.
Again, once you've done the development, the rest is mostly just marketing.
-Chris
--an unbreakable toy is useful for breaking other toys--
I believe the technical term your looking for is "ripoff"? As in "We should passively allow companies to foist ripoff after ripoff upon us, We should not demand honesty, either in marketting or value, from them and we certainly should not circumvent their schemes with sensible use." Would that be an acceptable translation?
Yes, I agree. Let's all be good little lambs and accept our latest corporate overlords.
Freeze! Cincinatti Police Officers. Now take your hands off the keyboard and step away from the PC. You are under arrest under the provisions of the DMCA, the Patriot Act, all legislation outlawing decss and hardware reverse engineering.
Not one game? Please.
I have an original ATI 9700 (128 MB, never overclocked it) and I can certainly tell you that it can do a hell of a lot more amazing things then some of the lower models (9500 and lower) in almost all 3D games based on my experience with other ATI cards.
Have you ever played GTA: Vice City at 1280 x 1024 x 32 bpp with 16X antialiasing, with fluid frame rates (fluid most of the time, except for some scenes like helicopters exploding next to you)?
Play the rifle range training level of America's Army with no antialiasing, and then with 16X AA. Look at the wires above, or at the chain link fences. Features like high-resolution AA which are only available in higher end models make an amazing difference between jagged geometric polygon edges and near-realistic, organic polygon edges.
Have you ever seen the ATI graphics demos, like the beautiful Paul Debevec's Rendering with Natural Light? Or any of the neat third-party demos, like Tomohide Kano's Dynamic Fur demo, that show specifically what the Radeon 9700/9800 chipset with Direct X 9 technology can do? Or watched even any detailed, taxing graphic demo at the highest resolution and quality settings?
If you've never experienced what the newer cards can do, then you are just ignorant, so don't make claims with no experience or evidence. There are very signifigant differences between the capabilities and performance of a Radeon 9000 (or even a 9500M), and a 9700. If you haven't seen the 9700 (or 9800) for yourself, you should see what it does and can do before saying absolutely no games benefit from newer models of cards. Because I can certainly tell you that you are wrong because I have seen otherwise.
Now, in games like Starcraft, of course you won't notice any performance gain. But it's not 3D in the first place. And, I will note that I do have an Athlon XP 3000 Barton over clocked to 2.41 GHz, and I crank up my ATI Radeon control panel settings to the highest quality settings.
I feel I must defend my $350 (when bought in October 2002) video card.
-- paper
I can turn a $300 card into a $400 card! Let me run out and spend $300 today to get 5% more performance than a card half it's price so I can save $100 on a card that will cost half that in 6 months anyway.
Now, turning a ATI 9500 in 9700 Pro was news, but this is not really worthy of front-page treatment.
Now, if NewEgg carries refurbished 5900s for cheap that can be turned into 5950s, call me.
- Proud owner of OC'ed, refurbished 9700.
PS - The apostrophe between "you" and "all" is unnecessary since you didn't leave any letters out. When contracting "you" and "all," it's typically accomplished by removing the "ou" like so: "y'all."
See how I managed to get some grammar nazi nonsense into this thread? I will now go off into the sunset singing the Rawhide theme, replacing "rollin'" with "trollin'."
I have an ATI Radeon 9800 pro now, and I know it's supposedly the better card. But I can't deal with the poor performance in wolfenstein enemy territory knowing it doesn't make the library calls needed by an ATI card. Would it make sense to just sell this card and go with a Geforce FX 5900?
Granted halflife2 and doom III should ride better with ATI?
What's with the 2005 for the copyright in the BIOS? It's only 2004!
It's a common manufacturing technique for calculators. The factory produces one PC board and puts it in different housings to create multiple models with different features. Sometimes there are jumpers on the PC board to enable/disable features.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
I didn't fix anything. My chip was malfunctioning, executing instructions wrong. I used an intense calculations with a known result (calculating Pi to a large degree of accuracy) to test this. Since my chip got the wrong answer that means it made an error. Now I was comparing the known output of a program with the supposed correct output of the same program. An imperitive device (like a processor) should get the same result in all cases. Mine failed to do so, indicating a problem.
This also explains the crashing of the system, and instruction would execute incorrectly, and cause a fatal problem.
This isn't some mathematical breakthrough, it's a chip driven past its limits that was breaking.
Uhh. Heh. Heh. He said overlords.
All hail the overlord.
All hail the overlord.
I'm in the market for a new henchman
I changed NT workstation 4.0 to NT Server with just 2 lines in the registry.
One was sold for 299, the other 799. Hmm no difference.
http://saveie6.com/
the reason they are guarenteed at certain clock speeds, and yes, I know what im talking about, is because when a chip is cast it is cast on a wafer, the area of the wafer is not uniform as you go from the center to the edges of the wafre. When the process is being done the wafers have impurities which can exist in some of the chips cast on the wafer.
So what they do is they have machines that roll the new made chip through and test how high it is "safe" to clock it at a certain level. The ones that are more impure get sold as a lower ghz chip, the ones that are more pure get sold as higher ghz chips.
When you overclock, you are overclocking a chip that has failed its pre-test qualifications for the clock speeds you want to clock it to, which is why thye wont give you money on your warrentee if you tell them you fried your chip overclocking.
If you don't vote, you don't matter, so don't waste your time telling me your opinion
I have an FX5200, is there some equivalent (like a 5250 Ultra or something) that I can use on mine?
You're kidding?
There always seems to be ways of making the picture look better given more GPU power.
Sure, your GeForce4MX440SE can do any of the following:
- High resolution (>1280),
- High refresh rate (>85Hz), sync'ed to VBLANK
- FSAA (eg 4x4)
Now, pick any one. That's right, ONE. Your GeForce4 will fall flat on its face trying to do even two of those.
Even simple games such as TuxRacer or GLTron look positively stunning when all of these features are used simultaneously.
The games of today (and even of two years ago) certainly DO benefit from cutting-edge video cards.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Had a life, am now baby sitting the kids resulting from it.
***You learn something Every day. And then you die.***
This has bigger implications than Nvidia or any graphics card company will be able to deal with.
Hi, I'm Mr. Knockoff in some foriegn country outside of the US juristiction. I just bought 1 of your top of the line cards and scanned in it's packaging. I have this pirate printer that will print out a million copies for dollars a roll.
I have this shack full of little kids I pay a dollar a day. They scratch out FX5900 and remark them FX5950 all day long.
And guess what, i'll be sending these back to the USA as grey market products. People won't even know the difference because I will have scratched out all references to FX5900 on the board/chips/bios/packaging and replaced them with that of the FX5950.
Enemy territory (a Quake 3 engine game) runs fine on my Radeon 7500. Do you have a low speed cpu or something?
The new bios probably increases the voltage to the memory and GPU and thus making it easier to overclock.
It's too bad they're the people didn't post scores of the cards with the original FX 5900 bios'. Was there any additional stability from the card when overclocking with the FX 5950 bios?
Mod parent up, mod this down.
kthx
Those get tossed, or made into keychains or the like.
So YOU're the guy with that 300mm keychain.
Cool. Don't suppose anyone's done this with a Geforce3 Ti 200?
What a joke, this is nothing like the Quadro mod that actually unlocked hidden features, this mod actually hurts your real world game performance.
I like it how it is magically able to overclock more with the new bios as well. What a joke.
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Did people who paid more money for the new & improved card get better performance? Then what's the fucking problem; they got what they paid for. Idiot.
Their website has drivers for every card they have ever made. I use a 6 year old Rage Pro in my firewall box, and an original Radeon DDR in my secondary machine I use for ripping DVD's and other time consuming activities. I installed the regular Catalyst drivers for the original Radeon I got in early 2001 that I installed on my 9700 Pro.
So in the Rage 128 days ATI had poor drivers, but that was years ago and that was not due to abandonment of a product. The company had a little trouble transitioning to 3D graphics cards, but so did lots of other companies. They eventually got their act together.
I am always amazed by these trollish fanboys. ATI used to be the only reliable company for drivers (1990-1998), and their image quality is and always has been top notch. Since the original Radeon came out, I think their support has been great.
I don't read or respond to AC posts
A 128 TB nVidia video card. :)
If I could get a real one of those, imagine the load times using a ramdrive...
OK troll, I'll bite..
Care to back that assertion up with any data? The Pentium FDIV flaw was, ooh, about 9 years ago now, and Intel admitted it and replaced affected processors..
Contrast that with the AMD JPEG decoding bug which AMD [AFAIK] never admitted, and which was far more recent..
And your point is?
I think he is talking about the Rage MAXX. Apparently ATI can't or won't make the card work with NT based OS's. It was something to do with how ATI setup the two video chipsets that required direct hardware access that the HAL on NT based OS blocked. I know in Linux it was possible to get it working as a regular Rage 128, and I think it would work the same Win2k/WinXP. so it would work, just not to its full potential.
On a side note, a large percentage of Rage128 had a hardware bug. This is why the drivers seemed so shoddy. I know that the DRI team had to code around the bug to get it to work right.
Just a Tuna in the Sea of Life
"Basically, if you do this, don't be surprised if your card becomes toast a shortwhile after."
What a splendid display of ignorance.
If you have a chip line, and you test each at its fastest speed, the ones that fail are simply downgraded.
The act of downgrading doesn't make the chip more susceptible to failure or that it will run hotter; it just means it doesn't work at the higher speed.
So it would make "toast". That's just stupidity dribbling from your chin.
But in this case, I doubt that's what's happening. Thae two product lines, same exact board, they load different bios's.
They don't even test.
Really, you are so ignorant of what happens in a modern fabrication plant, I advice you to stick to, well, reading on Slashdot.
That's still true between server/workstation on Windows 2000.
... if I had any games to play on it in Linux. OK so there are a few. But Armagetron is only so entertaining.
I have a All in Wonder Radeon, and the damned thing still refuses to capture video reliably under anything but WinME. ATI has to get my last $200 Radeon card to work long before I give them another $200.
Oh yeah. Damned english. I guess I have a ways to go before I become the SuperTroll. Do you think if I bashed Linus in the same sentence that would help my trolling, or would that just be overkill? (how many trolls can fit in the same post?)
Anyone else notice that the BIOS was copyrighted in the future? It's a nasty trick to buy cheap old hardware then send it back in time and sell it off when it's brand new or not yet released.
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May I now list you as a dumbass, I never said that there weren't errors, but Intels screw up calculations all the time. The structure itself isn't is as efficient... dumbass
Karma: Good, or bust!
By the way, I've used all of the listed processors there, and even ran a K6-2 233 in a laptop at 100% for 4 days without problems. I've also completed video encoding on a few videos on that processor too. From the site listed, a manufacturing process, not the processor design was to fault for. AMDs still do the same as a faster Intel due to the processor design.
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Bad thing is that you didn't read the article you linked... "Mr. Van Smith, editor of Van's Hardware, spoke with Mr. Damon Muzny of AMD after this issue became more widely discussed in various forums across the Internet in 2001. In Mr. Smiths article, "AMD Confirms JPEG Issue", July 21, 2001, AMD spokesman Damon Muzny confirmed this problem. According to Mr. Muzny "...the testing methods in past production cycles of the AMD-K6(R), AMD Athlon(TM) and AMD Duron(TM) processor families did not detect a small number of processors that exhibited a minor manufacturing issue that could potentially cause the distortion of JPEG images or MPEG audio/video. The issue is not design related and has been addressed through additional manufacturing tests AMD has implemented.""
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The actual chip is smaller, since I have an old Pentium in my keychain, but the whole thing is about that size.
Stock heatsink/fan ok for mild overclocks in a decent case. For anything more serious get yourself a copper-cored heatsink with an 80mm fan (quieter than a higher-speed 60mm one) and use that. Use decent thermal paste and you'll be able to overclock to your heart's content without high temps. Best CPU to do this on is a 2500 "Barton" core one though - up to 3200+ levels for 60UKP - just crank up the FSB...