by Anna Filatova
01/07/2003 | 11:47 AM
As is known, RADEON 9500 based graphics cards with 128MB graphics memory onboard following RADEON 9700 reference design can be converted into fully fledged RADEON 9700 128MB with the help of a soldering iron and BIOS reflashing. 64MB RADEON 9500 based graphics cards can also be modified this way, by enabling all 8 pipelines in them, but so far this hasn’t been done yet. There are no BIOS versions for these graphics cards yet, which do involve all 8 pipelines and work with 64MB of graphics memory. Our friends from Overclockers.ru and we haven’t yet managed to solve the problem completely, but we are on our way and would like to share the results achieved with you. We collected all possible BIOS versions, hex editors and other smart software and are trying really hard to prove cool software developers :) Although we do not yet have an absolutely correctly working BIOS version. Anyway, it is already possible to get an intermediate version of the modified graphics card. To do this you will have to resolder the resistor just the same way as we told you here (like in case of RADEON 9500 128MB). Then you will have to reflash the hacked BIOS for RADEON 9500 Pro. After you restart the system, you will see that half of the buttons and icons on your desktop have turned into black squares, and if you move the slider in the hardware acceleration panel in “Desktop properties” by two steps to the left, the squares will be not so numerous anymore. In 3D the card works just fine, but only with Catalyst 2.5 driver. With Catalyst 3.0 driver the card works beautifully in 2D, but completely unbearable in 3D. In case of RADEON 9500 128MB, which we converted into RADEON 9700, we face no trouble of the kind and it works just wonderfully with any drivers. Well, as we have already warned you this is an intermediate version still. Of course, the modified graphics card started working faster, and proved just perfect in games with Catalyst 2.5 driver. For our experiments we again took a card from Sapphire: RADEON 9500 64MB:
The modified graphics card managed to get overclocked up to 370MHz chip and 620Mhz graphics memory frequencies. We tested it before and after modifications in Quake3 Arena with maximum graphics quality settings and in Unreal Tournament 2003 with the following settings: Texture Detail: highest, World Detail: highest, Character Detail: highest, Physics Detail: normal, Character Shadows: on, Dynamic Lighting: on, Detail Textures: on, Projectors: on, Decals: on, Coronas: on, Decal Stay: normal, Foliage: on, Trilinear Filtering: on. The testbed was configured as follows:
