thinking of switching to a Radeon 9500 pro (need help)

[CurtisEbear]

Can anyone help me here? I'm pretty sure i'm going to buy the SAPPHIRE ATI OEM RADEON 9500 PRO 128MB DDR DVI BULK ($180)

Right now i have a Visiontek Geforce 3 ti200. I've heard that the 9500 overclocks well, and i was wondering a few things:

1. Is this a good card (as far as the different manufacturers of the 9500 pro go)?
2. Is the overclocking method the same as with an Nvidia card? I was using the coolbits registry hack with windows 98se, but i upgraded to XP, and i'm not OCing at all right now.
3. How much should i be able to overclock this card (ballpark estimate)?

Any help with these questions is appreciated, and any suggestions (but i don't want this to turn into an ATI vs Nvidia thing). thanks.

 

[Killrose]

(1)Saphire builds all of Ati's cards that are produced out side of Canada, and are termed Ati OEM, so quality is not an issue.
(2)you will have to download the 9500 Pro bios that has un-locked the card for overclocking.
(3)Overclocking the core 350+MHz/Mem 300+

 

[CurtisEbear]

thanks for the info! How does one go about flashing the BIOS for a video card? I've done a motherboard...not sure if video card is similar or different...

also, after i've got the new BIOS that allows overclocking, is the process the same as w/ geforce cards (move the slider, test, click apply)? or is there some different method?

sorry if the answers should be obvious, the whole flashing the video card thing sort of threw me off...

 

[Viper96720]

You'll need the bios flasher and a radeon tweaker program to overclock. You should be able to find both at rage3d. Flashing a video cards bios is similar to a motherboards.

 

[Jolyon33]

First you have to get the flash utility and the modded bios. You can get these at 3dchipset.com. Next you have to create a boot disk (the flash utility must be done in dos). Put the flash utility and the bios on the boot disk.

When you boot to dos using the disk, type these commands

atiflash -s 0 original.bin (copies original bios to disk, in case flash fails)

atiflash -f -p 0 9500warp.bin (9500warp.bin being the name of the modded bios)

If you need further instructions go to the overclocking section at rage3d. Posted sticky by Warp11 (creator of the modded bios)

 

[CurtisEbear]

thanks very much for the help. i appreciate it.

 

[kilmanjaro]

Actually, you don't have to flash the bios. All you need to do is run the RivaTuner Soft9700 patch script (yes I know we're talking about the PRO) and use PowerStrip to overclock it. It's that easy, no flashing required. The card you're looking at is the same card that I purchased from newegg. I've oc'd to 340/305 without artifacts. Not to shabby