9800 --> 9800 Pro. How?

[Karl|Neo]

hi, well, I've had my PC running stably for a couple of months now, so I'm starting to get ambitious , so I want to attempt to get my Saphirre 9800 to 'become' a 9800 pro, and I was wondering how I set about overclocking it, IE program to use, 9800 Pro clocks etc etc.
Thanx ppl,
Karl

[Sumanji]

Hey

Theres two ways of doing it:

i) Use RivaTuner or RadLinker to test/set the overclock from windows
ii) Flash the BIOS Pro Speeds (and make it appear as a Pro in Windows)

Do you know what memory chips etc you have on your card?

Suman

[BUFF]

If you use Omega's drivers they include a clockspeed tab (I think that it is just RadClocker integrated) in the CP.

[funnelhead]

yes you definatley need ot overclock it first to see if the card id capable of reaching pro speeds. omega drivers recommended - i used them to take my 9700 nonpro 275/270 to 325/310 (pro speeds). After a few days of playing games for hours on end (this was the hard part ) Once i knew it could handle it, i flashed the card with a pro bios, but this is only to be done if you are confident.

drivers:

http://www.omegacorner.com/

and this is the place to go to find out more. You will be able to find out what do do and where to get a bios if you want one from here.

http://www.rage3d.com/board/forumdisplay.php?forumid=22

hope this helps, F

[BUFF]

funnelhead,

Did you see any benefit from flashing the Pro BIOS ?

[CrapshoT]

if you are confident enough about flashing your bios why not flash it to a 9800xt bios
if yo have An ATI Radeon 9800NP or Pro capable of 412MHz core clock and 365MHz (730MHz DDR) memory clock you should be able to flash the bios to that of a 9800xt
read about how to do it here
http://www.3dmaxx.net/articles/xtflash/
im not confident enough to try and flash my bios yet tho who knows especially if i end up getting pis*ed thats when most of my experiments end up happening lol

[BEANFro Elite]

you should get the appropriate cooling other you'll fry it

[funnelhead]

Sorry didn't notice the question before Buff.

The benefit of flashing is simply that the card will now run at the pro speeds without teh need for 3rd party overclocking apps. It simply now *is* a 9700 pro, nomatter which pc it gets put in.

Of course there is also the benefit that it identifies itself as a 9700 pro. which is nice.

I've actually got it up to 360/335 now thoughso...

but be careful! flashing my card with atiflash resulted in my firmware being erased but not rewritten! i had no card for a month whilst waiting for a pci vga card to arrive. Then i managed to flash it using flashrom instead, which for some unknown reason works where atiflash will not.

So don't get complacent or cocky!

of course i was pretty cocky the night i got my card back from the dead! I was pretty drunk too......

F

[BUFF]

Thing is, my 9700 non-Pro card is already identified in 2 different PC's as a Pro!
Just wondered if changing to a Pro BIOS had given any extra performance - I know that people have said that different BIOS from different card mfrs have allowed them to reach higher overclocks etc.

[funnelhead]

yes thats true, but at least in some cases this was due do mem timings being relaxed - so performance actually went down, and you'd have to overclock more just to get the performance back

that said, if your confident about the procedure then its worth doing so as oc software isnt needed. Plus i'll be hapy to sell you my pci graphics card if it all goes wrong

[BUFF]

that said, if your confident about the procedure then its worth doing so as oc software isnt needed. Plus i'll be hapy to sell you my pci graphics card if it all goes wrong

Done it before & got 1 already thanks (haven't needed it though) !

[Karl|Neo]

thanx guys, my card got upto 370/340, which isn't quite enough to warrant a bios flash, however, the cooling in my pc is pretty poor, so I'll wait till I have some more case fans and see how it goes