Report on the 9500 -> 9700 conversion

T

Tom Kazansky

Guest
SUCCESS! My card now has double the fill rate, and my system is identifying the card as a 9700! No artifacting, everything is running perfectly! I'll post screenshots up if I get the chance. Only a 600 3D Mark increase, but it's limited by my other hardware. Anyone buying a new video card should give this a try!
 
Well it's a plain ol' 9700 heh, not a pro.  It's clocked at standard 9700 speeds just like the 9500 and 9500pro are.  The card was advertised as a sapphire, but when I went to the store(PC Canada, www.pccanada.com), it had a red PCB, which is normally the kind used by ATI and Gigabyte.  Apparantly the ones with the red PCBs are better for this, so I got lucky.  Cost was $254.99 CDN pre tax, which is nothing for you American folks ;).  It took me a while to figure out, and I had to enlist the help of two of my buddies to finally get it done.  If you know what you're doing it wont take a while.  You can get instructions at the Guru3D forums located here:

http://www.guru3d.com/forum....d=45430

Trust me, it's worth the $110 or so I saved
smile.gif
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Note: Anyone who wants to try this needs to get a 128 MB card, otherwise the extra rendering pipelines will have nowhere to attach themselves too.
 
Nope, it's a Sapphire. Got the logo on the CD heh, which I don't intend to use.
 
What do you mean a "normal" PCB? This doesn't work with a 9500 PCB, only a 9700 PCB. 9500 PCB doesn't have the extra bus lines so you CAN'T double your memory bandwidth.

And you'd have to be either a little crazy or pretty dumb to do the hardware mod for a few reasons.

a) warranty is void for sure, whereas it isn't with the software mod

b) you have to do the software mod anyway because sometimes the extra pipelines are faulty

c) the resistor is tiny, you need a precision job, and it's easy to lose and destroy(a few seconds on the iron and bye bye)
 
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