Well, not being one to give up easily, I have tried three Radeon 9500's on 9700 pcb to get a real 9700 Radeon. While I hard modded one and soft modded the other two easily, all showed 3D artifacts. I also tried a Radeon 9500 Pro and wasn't real impressed. I bought a used 9700 non pro for $170. I was gonna play with it for a little while, seeing how high it overclocked and just how fast it really was. I knew I could get easily over $200 on ebay for it. My current video card is still the GF4 Ti4200 @300/662, running the Omega 1.1.82 drivers it looks good and is fast.
Imagine my suprise when I loaded an overclocking utility to check the clock speeds, and to verify the need to flash an unlocked bios to change the clock speeds. 325/310? Hmmmm.......... I immediately jacked the memory to 340 and the core to 350. Holy crap, the overclock set and stayed, and the memory wanted to go higher! I knew what this meant, this was no 9700 non pro, this was a real 9700 Pro. It is happily running 365/350, a good overclock for the pro. I knew I was bound to get some good luck soon. With the other 9500's I had a glitch in Porsche Unleased, but turning off anisotropic (just in that game) fixed it. My 3Dmark ran in the mid 13K's, maybe I'm getting a little cpu limited (1700+ "B" on the way). But what really amazed me was running UT at 1600 x 1200, my usual resolution. I put FSAA on 4X and still hammered out 180 fps average! Jeez, that is some serious graphic power. I turned FSAA down to 2X and really couldn't see a difference, so I left it there. Unreal 2003 ran the flyby at 70fps, and the botmatch at 42fps at 1600 x 1200. The same as my Geforce4 at the same resolution, with one small difference. I left FSAA at 4X and got the same results as the GF4 with FSAA off, I am impressed.
Imagine my suprise when I loaded an overclocking utility to check the clock speeds, and to verify the need to flash an unlocked bios to change the clock speeds. 325/310? Hmmmm.......... I immediately jacked the memory to 340 and the core to 350. Holy crap, the overclock set and stayed, and the memory wanted to go higher! I knew what this meant, this was no 9700 non pro, this was a real 9700 Pro. It is happily running 365/350, a good overclock for the pro. I knew I was bound to get some good luck soon. With the other 9500's I had a glitch in Porsche Unleased, but turning off anisotropic (just in that game) fixed it. My 3Dmark ran in the mid 13K's, maybe I'm getting a little cpu limited (1700+ "B" on the way). But what really amazed me was running UT at 1600 x 1200, my usual resolution. I put FSAA on 4X and still hammered out 180 fps average! Jeez, that is some serious graphic power. I turned FSAA down to 2X and really couldn't see a difference, so I left it there. Unreal 2003 ran the flyby at 70fps, and the botmatch at 42fps at 1600 x 1200. The same as my Geforce4 at the same resolution, with one small difference. I left FSAA at 4X and got the same results as the GF4 with FSAA off, I am impressed.
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