sapphire relabeling 9800 xt to 9800 pro!?

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Originally posted by Soulburner
Did you get this figured out yet?

I hope mine is at my door tomorrow. I'll run it stock, then flashed, and note any differences.

Then, i'll rig up my custom cooling and give it hell...

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Yeah...of all things it was a bad FDD drive.

The BIN files were getting screwed on the transfer from hard-disk to floppy....


I made a new flash disk on my server and the BIN flashed no problem...

My only thing is that the core tops out around 430 without volts...the mem does 380 with ease uncooled and un-voltmodded.

If the core goes over 470 with volts..I keep...if not..it goes to RMA land.

With what kind of cooling?

The stock one?

Can you measure the default GPU volts?

hollywood, glad you got that figured out bro, I was about to reply to your PM before I read this. My fdd's always gettin corrupted, I have no idea why, always screws up my raid driver installs during windows setup.

about the core, try swapping a different cooler on there, even with my massive Athlon hsf, it still gets soo damn hot. Im about to go pickup an old SLK and figure out how to mount it and secure it to the case so it can hold the weight. These things get warm.

Well it looks like I won't have it until probably Friday, they didn't ship this one as fast as they have in the past... :(

Hey guys, sort of off topic, but the XT bios gives more volts to the CPU, right? Is there a way to edit a BIOS to give your GPU whatever voltage you want without having to do a solder volt mod?

No, the core volts is not handled through the BIOS, it is implemented through hardware.

The core volt is set at 1.8v even before the flash I believe (on these cards in this thread).

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Originally posted by Semper Fi
hollywood, glad you got that figured out bro, I was about to reply to your PM before I read this. My fdd's always gettin corrupted, I have no idea why, always screws up my raid driver installs during windows setup.

about the core, try swapping a different cooler on there, even with my massive Athlon hsf, it still gets soo damn hot. Im about to go pickup an old SLK and figure out how to mount it and secure it to the case so it can hold the weight. These things get warm.

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Flashed to 9800XT BIOS successfully....defaulting at XT speeds.

Well...this is with my Alpha PAL6035 just as displayed in this thread:

http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/...threadid=29962

Max core without artifacts before volts is 430. I have a feeling some juice will hook this thing up...will get on it tonight. Funny thing is I never even ran the card with the original heatsink. ;)

Mem unvolted and unsinked is 380 max.

Will keep progress updated. Now I need to find a good XT voltmodding guide!!!

this is slightly off topic, but whats a good way to get into volt modding? I have all the supplies, Im just afraid Im going to trash my hardware.

Damn Hollywood that is extremely crappy...

If mine only goes 430 before artifacts even with a CPU heatsink...I will be one xtremely unhappy camper (I dont have the tools to do any volt mods, this card will run at stock volts).

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Originally posted by Soulburner
Damn Hollywood that is extremely crappy...

If mine only goes 430 before artifacts even with a CPU heatsink...I will be one xtremely unhappy camper (I dont have the tools to do any volt mods, this card will run at stock volts).

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Well...there is hope...as I think I just found the reason for the cruddy pre-voltmod clocks.

It seems that these cards were not just flashed with a 9800Bios but made with really low vcore as well...especially when compared to an actual 9800XT.

DEFAULT 9800XT VOLTAGES:

1.77 VGPU

2.69 VMEM

DEFAULT Sapph 9800Pro 256 / aka 9800XT VOLTAGES:

1.69 VGPU (quite low;) )
2.66 VMEM

It seems that these cards are voltage handicapped at the factory as well. This was troubling me as my R9800P was clocking at least 450 core without voltmods...but it's default voltage was 1.73. So this may explain the mystery.

Voltmodding in progress...results tomorrow.

Looks like it's time to buy some soldering equipment and study up on doing volt mods for me, too. My 9800pro's core only goes 425 without artifacts on water cooling. (128 meg sapphire, bought before this thread started...) I was hoping for 440 or so. Heat is definitely not an issue. The top side of the card where the core is only barely gets warm after tons of benches or gaming. My guess is that low voltage is holding me back.

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Originally posted by Semper Fi
this is slightly off topic, but whats a good way to get into volt modding? I have all the supplies, Im just afraid Im going to trash my hardware.

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Best IMO to practice with some dead hardware first. Do a search, there is a newbie guide to solddering in here somewhere. Remember to tin your tip or your wire first, use just enough to do the job, etc. Use the right soldder. Sooner or later you will be confident enough to go for the real thing. Start with an easy volt mod where the pins are large and far apart.
;)

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Originally posted by Hollywood
Well...there is hope...as I think I just found the reason for the cruddy pre-voltmod clocks.

It seems that these cards were not just flashed with a 9800Bios but made with really low vcore as well...especially when compared to an actual 9800XT.

DEFAULT 9800XT VOLTAGES:

1.77 VGPU

2.69 VMEM

DEFAULT Sapph 9800Pro 256 / aka 9800XT VOLTAGES:

1.69 VGPU (quite low;) )
2.66 VMEM

It seems that these cards are voltage handicapped at the factory as well. This was troubling me as my R9800P was clocking at least 450 core without voltmods...but it's default voltage was 1.73. So this may explain the mystery.

Voltmodding in progress...results tomorrow.

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no way man ;) i mean .. did you check the values my card had? no matter if pro or xt bios was flashed my card was idling around

vgpu: 1.778v
vref: 1.505v (yea +0.1v)
vmem: didn't bother with my swinging sixties voltages...

keep the multimeter hooked and have it measure the voltages while fully loaded.. good ole 3dmark 01+03 should be enough and report back, what the readings are then.

seems i was right about the volts part. something regulating the voltages on these cards seems dope. how else would your card get a "little" less juice than necessary, while mine occasionally gets way to much (speaking of vref).

oh and the vgpu voltmod didn't do jack for me. it mostly just stabilized my core voltage around 1.78v (set to 1.90v! and briefly showing that true value on booting, so the mod was working after all) ;)

also if you all are looking for vmods, i guess you just check out the 9800xt vmod in the mods-section. that's what i did.

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Originally posted by TheDude
Best IMO to practice with some dead hardware first. Do a search, there is a newbie guide to solddering in here somewhere. Remember to tin your tip or your wire first, use just enough to do the job, etc. Use the right soldder. Sooner or later you will be confident enough to go for the real thing. Start with an easy volt mod where the pins are large and far apart.
;)

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yup dude, that's exactly the way i would start - and actually did start :D. i grabbed an old bnc-nic which was (is?? :D ) still working before i went about it - but who still uses bnc today. that did a good deal for me regarding learning how long you can touch your soldering iron to the part in question, etc..
but then again i'm more of the ghetto-vmodder anyway using hotglue (yea baby yea) as seen in my pics. the first mod i did was my 9600tx - trying in hotglue ;) later on using real solder and again hotglue, this time to insulate it. so with this 9800 i decided to use hotglue first as i wasn't sure about the card - voltages and mods were working and you don't see ANY trace in the card - and if you don't pull on the wires they're pretty much fixed aswell.

thanks Dude, Ill get crackin tomorrow

sky, you mean you just glue the tips of the wires directly to the contact points? thats awesome! :toast:

yea.. only thing is you have to hold the wires down for good until the hotglue has cooled down else you'll probably won't get a reading or contact. then your basically set. and it's also very easy to get off. this is why i use it first to test a card - and if it works and the card seems to be a keeper i'll remove it and do it the old fashioned way :D. then some hotglue to fix and insulate the wireends from shorting other pins and you're set for eternity - whatever that means in a gfx-cards lifespan... :)

does the glue ever melt under extreme load during benching or anything?

Semperfi, yes hotglue gets soft in situations like say hot RAMsinks without proper airflow. Then the RAMsinks will fall off.
But in the case of attaching wires it will stay.

btw, greetings to your governor! ;)

The glue is nice as insulation. The first mod I ever tried was a trimmer on a PSU. When I turned it with a screwdriver,(while running) the pressure pushed it into contact with another component shorting out my mod and blowing the PSU! Insulation good....Fire bad!

hmm, i'm wondering how my coolermaster copper 1u cooler with 60-80mm fanduct and a 33cfm 80mm fan will cool an XT gpu.

1U huh....those do pretty well though I think my Aeroflow should beat it.

I had a Dynatron Copper 1U on my 5950 at 550 core so it works pretty well.

I just hope I get a "good one" and not some gimped card that the cooling won't even help...

BTW what are you guys using to measure this point of artifacting?

Are you using ATITool or are you actually running it through 3DMark?

Also, how about some different BIOSes? Once you force the XT flash, it shouldn't be locked anymore, right?

i'm using atitool to see where the individual max clocks SHOULD be since it will give me way lower clocks for combined. and then it really is testing with 3dmark '03. if you can pass thru nature without those nasty little white dots you should be ok. some guys use certain spots in games - i think catch22atplay uses unreal2 or something like that. but my bet is on '03.

never tried a different bios. but then again i had a short look into the bios with radlinker and didn't find any big difference between the pro and the xt-bios other than the clockspeeds. but i don't know if you can have a more detailed analysis of the bios with other tools.

Well...I finished the mods on my card and it's not looking too good. I've got this gigantic Alpha HSF on the GPU...it's making great contact, etc.

Then I did the voltmods. *Note: I used 10k VRs..if thats wrong..then it may be a reason...please correct my choice of VR if wrong)They worked...but not nearly as well as when I did my 9800Pro. At first it wouldn't even boot with the vcore @ 1.91v. I then had to gradually step the voltage down to 1.78 vcore. It boots there...but it still sucks. Now for the vmem...did that one too...However it didn't seem to do anything except make my card more unstable, as ANY voltage above 2.8 resulted in reboots under heavy load.

Max before voltmods: 430/270

Max after voltmods: 425/270 :mad: :(

So...I've removed all mods and flashed back to default. The card then works just dandy as a plain 'ol 9800 Pro for hours of stress testing. I ordered another one last night as this dog is going back to the pound.:mad:

VMEM:

VGPU:

*Note - It may look like my wires are on kinda sideways and may be contacting or shorting...but they're not...I simply bend the tip of the wire into a small "L" so a flat portion makes contact with surface.

On my voltmods I fix the wires with prommy sealstring ;). It sticks like hell and is also easy to remove.