Powercolor 9800SE to 9800XT mod .. Working!

JedyKnight · Feb 16, 2004, 07:39 AM

Thats right .. after a change of bios the pc detected right away the 9800XT and no artifacts and no black lines .. just plain good. So if u are wondering if the mod will improve something here it goes.

The card didnt improve his o/c with xt bios, and fps on games are pretty relative as i didnt test much but seems more smooth on some games .. but 3dmark results prove differently as i passed from 6013 to 6253 and i didnt max overclock it .. less 10 on core for stability test.

Btw this was tested with 4.2 omega .. and the improvements on 3dmark was a 2 fps average on all games except nature (only 0.9 improvement) and on GT1-wings of fury with 4 fps improvement, the fill rate improved as well .. 95 on single texturing and (didnt expect this one) 179 on multi texturing .. and the one i didnt saw it coming was the pixel shader test with a 7 fps improvement. The vertex test and the rest was just the same.

3dmark01 score ... This can be somewhat unaccurate because it was made with omega 4.1 and omega 4.2 .. but i didnt have time to test the card with omega 4.2 before the mod .. only 3dmark03 ..

So score with 3dmark01 is 18239 where it was before 17860 but im sure such improvement are not only from the drivers

RebelWolf · Feb 17, 2004, 02:14 AM

This is very interesting.

Can you supply us with more information, exactly which 9800SE do you have, and which 9800XT bios did you use with it?

The part I find the most interesting, is the fact that the card overclockability didn't change, but it still gained some performance from a bios change. I would have expected gains from the OC standpoint rather than added efficiency. This leads me to speculate on one of two possible reasons why this would happen.

1. The bios is simply more effecient. If this is the case, it would be interesting to find out what they changed to gain the added speed.

2. The drivers detect the 9800XT name, and act slightly differently because of it. This would be easy to find out, if performance goes up or down on the same bios, with a Name/ID change from a bios editor, then this is the case. The downside of course, even if this was what was happening, is that the speed gained may be at the sacrifice of stability somewhere, since the driver may be expecting a feature on the R360 that isn't there on the R350.

Only way we find out, is more people testing it

and nope, I'm not volunteering.

RebelWolf

JedyKnight · Feb 17, 2004, 06:32 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by RebelWolf
This is very interesting.

Can you supply us with more information, exactly which 9800SE do you have, and which 9800XT bios did you use with it?

The part I find the most interesting, is the fact that the card overclockability didn't change, but it still gained some performance from a bios change. I would have expected gains from the OC standpoint rather than added efficiency. This leads me to speculate on one of two possible reasons why this would happen.

1. The bios is simply more effecient. If this is the case, it would be interesting to find out what they changed to gain the added speed.

2. The drivers detect the 9800XT name, and act slightly differently because of it. This would be easy to find out, if performance goes up or down on the same bios, with a Name/ID change from a bios editor, then this is the case. The downside of course, even if this was what was happening, is that the speed gained may be at the sacrifice of stability somewhere, since the driver may be expecting a feature on the R360 that isn't there on the R350.

Only way we find out, is more people testing it and nope, I'm not volunteering.

RebelWolf

My SE card has a normal 9800pro red PCB with memory aligment in the L shap and 256bit mem bus with hynix 2.8n mem chips currently running with the PowerColor XT bios.

http://mbnet.fi/elixir/XT/Powercolor...sung.05.23.bin

That is the bios i used .. and 1 more thing about stability, it highly improved after i turned agp voltage up to 1.7v on the bios.

Zebra · Feb 17, 2004, 09:46 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by JedyKnight
My SE card has a normal 9800pro red PCB with memory aligment in the L shap and 256bit mem bus with hynix 2.8n mem chips currently running with the PowerColor XT bios.

http://mbnet.fi/elixir/XT/Powercolor...sung.05.23.bin

That is the bios i used .. and 1 more thing about stability, it highly improved after i turned agp voltage up to 1.7v on the bios.

Who is the manufacturer of your 9800SE card?

Erukian · Feb 17, 2004, 02:26 PM

Read the topic Zebra

Zebra · Feb 17, 2004, 04:24 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by Erukian
Read the topic Zebra

Oops!

nuG · Feb 17, 2004, 07:58 PM

Too bad i cant turn my 9700 pro into a 9800xt...........

CrapolaJola · Feb 17, 2004, 10:56 PM

I'd say the small improvement you recieved came from Rebel said. Better bios that is more efficient, a driver optimization specifically R360/XT cards, and other thign that may have effected it slightly margin of error (altho margin of error doesn't make that big of a difference). Also I'm assumign you've already tried to softmod your card, but if you haven't I'd reccomend it as it's a huge speed gain compared to a bios change which won't help at all or will help in a small way (like OCing), although this depends onwhat your flashign to and from 9800se to 9800xt and 9500np to 9700np/pro seem to be the best ones.

JedyKnight · Feb 18, 2004, 11:24 AM

U dont get it ... it is softmoded to pro but with bios change turned into a XP .. if u check latest omega release of 4.2 catalyst u will see in release note .. supported detection of 9800se to 9800xt. So the scores i showed before was a softmoded to pro to a softmod+xt bios scores

Changing the bios will not enable the 8 pipeline alone i presume

At least with pro bios didnt worked .. had to use softmod with bios

koffe · Feb 18, 2004, 11:41 AM

No driver kan help me with my card.... I get artifact with every driver!

I know nothing can help me fix this and it buggs me so.... fux

CrapolaJola · Feb 18, 2004, 07:12 PM

In your first post you didn't specify that you had done softmod and I shouldn't have assumed it as some people do flash flashes even if they don't softmod. Also, your right there no bios that will enable the extra 4 pipelines although that'd be great if we could do that lol. Hmm I wanna get a a 9800se and softmod and flash it so bad, but theres chance it could fail ugh such a predicement. Woulnd't be whole a big improvement over my softmodded 9500 thats beyond 9700pro clocks, but I could sell my current card making the 9800se cost nothing.

dsdsdk · Feb 19, 2004, 05:29 AM

nice, i might try it! i got a Club3d 9800SE 128mb 256bit with Hynix. what does it say on the mem chip?