In article ,
says...
On Fri, 17 Oct 2003 13:22:58 +0100
BoroLad wrote:

In article e6hjb.787009$uu5.137574@sccrnsc04,
says...
What is soft-mod? When it asks if i want to install normal, soft mod
9500(includes 9500-9700), or soft mod 9800, which would be best for
me to use on a 9700 Pro, and why?

I suppose i'll do the 'soft mod 9500' which looks like it includes
9700 pro

SoftMod applies to amongst others the 9500np range, here the 'red'
board with 'L' shaped memory with x4 pipelines was capable with the
Omega's to be modded to a 9800 with x8 pipelines.

Thus saving [at the time] £220.

You see the 9500np and the 9800 were the same thing with the 9500np
having x4 of it's pupelines closed off. The SoftMod opened these up!.

Was that a typo? The 9500np used the same chip and in early releases
the same board as the 9_7_00, not the 9800. There's no "lite" version
of the 9800 equivalent to the 9500np--the 9600 is in the equivalent
marketing slot but they've closed the pipelines in the chip instead of
on the board.

That's correct ATi 'kicked off big time' over the 'shiploads' of
moddable 9500np's and because the 'partners' were not quick enough to
stop their processing of moddable boards ATi shut the pipes on GPU.

It's possible to overclock a modded 9500np or 9700 to the same
performance levels as a 9800 but contrary to popular belief that does
not turn one of them into a 9800--for most purposes the performance
should be pretty much the same but you don't get the new pixel shader
and other enhancements, which may or may not be an issue in the future
depending on what the game designers decide to do.

Not a 'typo' but certainly not enough quality info on my part, the
default install of any of the 'Omega' driver sets will give 9800 frame
performance in games [not benchmarks] but can never give pixel shader
etc because it's still not a 9800.

Amazingly I just yesterday did a 'L' Red original reference 9500np as a
9800 performance card. In Feb this year I bought 6+6 of these boards,
one of them paid for by the customer I've held onto all of this time, he
showed up on Monday and I built an Abit NF7-S v2.0 [MCP2-T] for him
yesterday.

The v2.4.96b drivers defaulted, set the gart and ran at 9800 no problems
at all - of course all this is academic if you don't have a Red L
Reference board

If you have a 'red' board with 'L' shaped memory come back & ask a
question!

BoroLad
--
Regards BoroLad ¸ô¶ó