Well, itlooks as if nearly everybody has already read on our site (see this and this news stories) about the experiment carried out by our friends from the Russian Overclockers.ru site. We decided to repeat this experiment in our testlab. Now we would like to describe the modification procedure step by step:

1. We took Sapphire RADEON 9500 graphics card equipped with 128MB graphics memory.
   
   
   

2. We removed the cooler from the graphics chip and resoldered the resistor located on the chip wafer to a new place. The picture below shows the resistor in a new place already:
   

3. Then we cleaned the graphics chip surface and the cooler footing from the remains of the standard thermal paste and put a new layer of fresh paste.

4. We installed the cooler back onto the chip.

5. We made a special boot-up DOS disk and saved there the files required for new BIOS reflashing: atiflash.exe, dos4gw.exe, atiflash.cfg (you can download these files here). Of course, we saved the new BIOS file there as well. We used the hacked BIOS for Hercules RADEON 9700 based graphics card: 97npherc.bin.

6. Having installed the card into our system we booted-up from the disk.

7. Just in case we saved the old BIOS file into the old.bin file with "atiflash -s 0 old.bin" command.

8. We reflashed the new video BIOS with "atiflash -u 0 -f 97npherc.bin" command. When the program asked if we really wanted to reflash the new BIOS we answered “yes” :)

9. Remove the floppy disk and restart your system.

So, RADEON 9500 128MB has been successfully turned into RADEON 9700! After the modifications the card worked as fast as RADEON 9700 and proved very stable throughout the entire test period. During overclocking the maximum frequencies we managed to achieve were: 390MHz for the chip and 620MHz (310MHz DDR) for the graphics memory.