Radeon 9800 LE moddable to 9800 Pro?

[marinlicina]

I'm running a P4 2.8 @ 3.2 on an ASUS P4P800 Deluxe with 1GB of PC3200 dual channel ram.

My vid card is a modest Club 3D Radeon 9800 LE, you know, the 128-bit version of the 9800 Pro. The card is identical on all other fields except for the 128-bit architecture and the 350/350 clocks. I am currently using the Arctic Cooling VGA Silencer cooler and Arctic Silver Ceramique as the paste on the R350 core.

I ran 3D Mark 03 with Omega Drivers (standard) and got 3658 as the score.

Then I tried the SoftMod driver by Omega, for 9800 SE --> 9800 Pro. Now what this thing does, as far as I know, is that it opens up the 4 pixel pipelines that the 9800 SE doesn't use. The 9800 LE already uses 8 pipelines. What's even more strange, the 9800 SE's with 265-bit architecture accept the mod, the 128-bit ones don't. But the card booted, It said Radeon 9800 pro and no problems. So I thought about giving it a go in 3dM03:

The score (and I did this a few times to be sure) leaped to 4782 I checked the clocks to make sure that the softmod didn't o/c the card to R9800 Pro speeds but nope, they still were 350/350. What the feck is going on?

Anyone ever heard of something like this? Everything else stayed the same. All 3D Mark tests were ran after boot, nothing else was changed. WTF?

 

[Gamingphreek]

First of all it is 256bit memory.

Second of all that little mod doesn't work on all cards. The most common are Powercolor cards.

-Kevin

 

[marinlicina]

Yeah but we are talking R350 core with 128-bit memory and 8 Pipelines.... As far as I know, no mod can make 128bit into 256bit mem, can it? And the mod achieves 8 open pipelines. But they are already open!!! So in theory, it should do... NOTHING. But how come my 3DMark score leaps 1000 when I do that?

 

[reallyscrued]

hahahah thats the most insane thing i eva heard. u wanna email ATI on this one or should i?

actually i have a theory, maybe 3dmark didnt use the extra pipelines cuz it didnt think it would function (which it wouldnt have, they were disabled at driver level) until u gave it the Pro surname, it tried to use all 8 pipelines which resulted in the performance boost. go back to the LE bios and bench once again just to make sure, then flash once more to Pro and see if the same thing happens. If ur really happy with ur results, i'd leave it alone and not "feck" with it rite now.

is there such a thing as disabling 128 bits of mem bandwidth at driver level also? freakin wierd.

just for another laugh i'd enjoy, how much did u buy the LE for and how much is the Pro?

and finally....WHAT WERE U THINKIN FLASHING TO THE PRO BIOS ANYWAY!!!!! u read it, its 128 bits, u cuda just killed the damn card.

........i wish cpu's had bioses....

 

[MDE]

He didn't flash the card, he used the Omega Drivers softmod which is completely, and easily reversible.

 

[LTC8K6]

But the score is not what a 256bit 9800pro would get, is it? Can you overclock the core to 9800pro speeds and get a score similar to a full 9800pro?