Which x800 pro to buy?

[iamskew]

I had my mind made up that I was going to buy the HIS version from newegg. But now I've heard that I should get a card with VIVO, because it can be flashed to an x800xt. The HIS has the very nice heatsink and fan though.

Here's the 2 cards


HIS
Celestica

Any opinions would be much appreciated. And no, don't tell me to get a 6800GT instead. I've trusted Nvidia in the past and they've let me down...I won't use them again any time soon.

skew

 

[Cawchy87]

HIS deffinitally has the better cooler, no experiance from them myself however.

 

[JBT]

From what I have read the Vivo's only need a bios flash to be 16 pipe cards, which would be pretty sweet...

 

[ronnn]

Originally posted by: JBT
From what I have read the Vivo's only need a bios flash to be 16 pipe cards, which would be pretty sweet...

Yes I have read almost 100% success with the vivo, but that may be fanboys at work.

 

[iamskew]

indeed, it could be fanboys putting up hype. It honestly doesn't make much sense to me though that a company would send out the same card labeled differently. While it would be more efficient for them to make, it would cost more...and seeing as how this card is mostly for high-end users who would know how to do things like flash the bios, it wouldn't make much sense for them to lose any money if they didn't have to.

 

[Creig]

I dunno. They did the same thing with the 9500. You could turn about 60% of the 9500's into a 9700 with a simply driver hack. The same applies to turning a nvidia 6800 from 12 pipes to 16.

Rather than throw out GPUs that have only 1 bad pipeline they simply disable that block of 4 pipes and use the core in a lower end card. But if there aren't enough bad cores to fill demand then they have to substitute fully operational cores.

 

[sleepeeg3]

Originally posted by: ronnn

Originally posted by: JBT
From what I have read the Vivo's only need a bios flash to be 16 pipe cards, which would be pretty sweet...

Yes I have read almost 100% success with the vivo, but that may be fanboys at work.

It's definitely not the fanboys. I saw a poll on I think Hard, but it might have been OCForums or EOCF (not sure the first two even have poll capability) and it was like 9X% success rate. Also sounded like that the ones who said they weren't successful, were still getting the pipelines enabled, but just not the clock speeds. The original poll was asking if they have successfully flashed from an X800 Pro -> XT PE and some people were interpreting that to mean clock speeds as well. Even if the clocks aren't there, the extra 4 pipes gives a tremendous performance boost.

Bottom line, it sounds like it's 100% on the softmod. Anyway, just so you guys know Go with the VIVO if you're going to buy retail.