9500 card confusion Please Help!

[Naginrej]

I am so freakin confused. I ordered an oem 9500 pro card. I got the card and the sticker says Radeon 9500 128m. So I told the sales person that it was not pro. The sales person got on the web and put the 1029423232 (P/N) into a website which stated it was a 9700 pro!!! I called ATI and they said the same thing. I compared the board configuration to the pictures in THG's review of the 9500 pro and my configuration exactly matches the 9700 Pro picture and doesnt look anything like the 9500 pro picture. I was excited that maybe I got a 9700 pro for the 9500 pro price ($172). Then I installed it and the softaware said the chipset was 9500 AGP???? Then I called Sapphire who made the card. That guy took the 102...# and said "It is a nonpro 9500" I told him about what ATI said and the picture match and he told me to download 3dMark2001. I did and used the defaults for 10024x768 and 1280x1024 and got scores of 10198 and 7680 respectively. HELP!!!! What do I have????

<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by Naginrej on 03/07/03 01:27 PM.</EM></FONT></P>

 

[TheGreatGrapeApe]

Sounds to me like the card alot of tweakers are looking for. A 9700pro that has been either hardware or software disabled to run as a 9500 <b> NON-PRO </b>.
This is a highly sought-after card for some, but if you are not into soft-madding or hardware modding, then you have a 9500 non-pro which you paid pro price for. However it should mean you can overclock it pretty good, but once again depends on if you like to leave things stock.
Someone else around here can probbably tell you more, but that's my take on your situation.

- You need a licence to buy a gun, but they'll sell anyone a stamp <i>(or internet account)</i> ! <font color=red>RED</font color=red> <font color=green>GREEN</font color=green> :tongue: GA to SK

 

[Naginrej]

How do you modify it to act as the 9700 pro that it looks like it was built to be? And how could I verify if I indeed actually have a disabled 9700 pro? Highly sought after? Who seeks this card? Where on the web could I find these tweaking seekers? Maybe I could resell the card.

<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by Naginrej on 03/07/03 01:26 PM.</EM></FONT></P>

 

[Crashman]

goto <A HREF="http://www.rage3d.com" target="_new">http://www.rage3d.com</A> and look around in the news, forums, etc. You'll find a lot of information. Basically it comes down to this: There is a small resistor on the chip that changes which chip it is detected as. Early modifications involved moving that resistor from the 9500 to the 9700 position. Later hackers found they could hack the driver itself to misdetect the card as a 9700, enabling the 9700 features. So now you can do it by either software OR hardware.

To make it 9700 Pro speed, you need to modify the BIOS to allow it to overclock, as the clock mutliplier is locked to prevent overclocking. But simply turning it into an "underclocked 9700" is enough to get you around 25% better performance.

If everything works, you may consider the resistor mod and the BIOS flash to make it into a 9700 or 9700 Pro permanently.

<font color=blue>Watts mean squat if you don't have quality!</font color=blue>