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News Glance: The Essential Commentary on the Week’s Hottest News (page 3)

Category: Editorial

by Anton Shilov

[ 06/14/2004 | 08:04 AM ]

Enthusiasts Confirm: RADEON X800 PRO – Transformable

A good news for all hardware enthusiasts is possibility to modify the RADEON X800 PRO graphics card into far more powerful and extremely expensive RADEON X800 XT product. But a bad news is that far not all the RADEON X800 PRO can be transformed into the higher-end products with 16 pixel pipelines.

After the RADEON 9500 and the RADEON 9800 SE were found to be “mod-friendly” into more advanced graphics cards, enthusiasts all around the world started to pay great attention at Powered by ATI graphics products after spending years overclocking NVIDIA GeForce-based graphics cards. The history is repeating today when some hardware maniacs confirm that ATI’s $399 SKUs can be easily modded into $499 graphics cards that have the world’s highest performance these days.

ATI RADEON X800 XT and X800 PRO graphics cards

“We do not encourage modifying graphics cards. This is not because it might affect sales, we do not believe that it does, but because if something goes wrong in the modding process, the modder could be left with a dead board. And modding invalidates the warranty, so we would not be able to replace it,” said Chris Evenden, director of public relations for ATI Technologies.

The question that remains unclear is why ATI does not eliminate the possibility to mod the chips – this could give a boost to sales of higher-end graphics cards and also exclude the possibility to damage graphics cards. The matter is truly vague, though, what is absolutely not a secret is that ATI does not want enthusiasts to go the GeForce overclocking route.