148mhz radeon ... i have one..and here is my theory

[hans007]

I bought this radeon on the forsale/trade forum for $105 (well it was another student at school. It cost more than the deal from hotdeals, but i didnt know about it). Anyways, mine doesnt say LE on it anywhere. I installed it into win2k and it is detected as a radeon DDR, not radeon DDR LE or anything like that. However power strip says its only running 148/148. First off, i doubt ATI would go to the lengths of modifying the hardware to cripple the JUST the hyperZ. These are probably just regular radeons, and that is what most people here have figured out. Also back when the aiti xper128 based on the rage128 came out it was also like this. ATI made 4 clock speeds of the card. 75/75, 90/90, 103/103 and 100/110. At one point reactorcritical released the pirated bios and bios flasher utils from ATI and it was possible to flash a 75/75 one to 100/110. Also i personally had a 75/75 one and flashed it to 100/110 and it worked fine. It then proceeded to work at 125/135. The only difference in all these cards was that the 75 and 90mhz ones didnt have heatsinks. Kinda like this new 148mhz OEM radeon (the 75/75 was strictly an OEM part also, some of the retails were 90mhz though). Also another thing was that the 75/75 with the 75/75 bios did not work at even 100/100 using power strip but upon flashing the bios it worked fine. My theory was that the memory timings in the bios were setup to run faster (i.e. CAS and RAS latency were lower) when the memory was only clocked at 75mhz. Kinda like pc100 at cas2 or pc133 at cas3 is pretty much the same. So when you flash the new bios thats what happens. So these new radeon 148mhz cards might possibly be that. I doubt that the hardware hyperz itself is crippled in the silicon because that wouldn't save a very big amount of die space most likely, and also require another die, this comlicating things at the fab. At most and i even doubt this , is that they have a driver that cripples it ala the 3dfx velocity 100 and its missing 2nd TMU.

 

[oldfart]

Testing (see messages in this forum) have shown that HyperZ is disabled in D3D, but not OpenGL on the LE cards. It can be easily turned back on via registry settings. By doing that and increasing the clock speed, it will run just as well as any non "LE" card.