9700 pro --> 9800 pro softmod?

[Ethos]

Is this possible? I've seen a few sites around the internet but they all link to one DEAD site!

http://www.icrontic.com/?action=article&id=411

Will it simply raise the clocks of the card or are there any other advantages?

Cheers, Ethos

[TiG]

Ask yourself this question - How can software modding a card give it hardware improvements?. 9700 pro and 9800 pro are not built on the same hardware, unlike the early 9500 and 9500 pro's which where built on the same hardware as the 9700 and 9700 pro's. The same is not true of the 9800's tho.

In otherwords NO its not possible.

TiG

[SilentDeath]

9700pros can overclock past 9800pro stock performance, but the cores are slightly different.

[Ethos]

Fair enough, I don't know much about "softmodding" so thanks for the heads up

[Austin]

The 9700PRO is very nearly identical to the 9800 (nonPRO) and should o/c to around 9800PRO speeds and hence 9800PRO perf. The only significant diffs in the 9700 vs 9800 is improved AA+AF (some of which is sw based) and the addition of the T-buffer which seems to make no noticable difference currently. So soft modding a 9700PRO to a 9800PRO would mean applying AA+AF optimisations and o/c'ing although you'd still be a tiny smidge under the true 9800PRO. Since it's now believed ATI's own CATs apply the sw AA+AF part of the 9800 optimisation to the 9700 (and 9500?) it is of little relevance. It was rumoured that ATI would turn off the sw AA+AF enhancements for 9700 series to make the 9800 look better. Anyway the Omega drivers have had it for some time. So basically it's nothing you can't do yourself but you can never have a 100% true 9800PRO (just 99.5%).

FWIW the final 9500 series (ie PRO & nonPRO) used a different PCB to the 9700 series but sported exactly the same technology. They were only seperated by the 9700, 9500PRO and 9500 having slower clocks and the 9500 series having 128bitDDR and the lowly 9500 (nonPRO) only 4 pipes. BTW what was the link showing as I saw nothing specific about 9700-9800 modding.