Just bought a 9500 PRO

[BloodDonor]

i paid for it yesterday.... *waits for courier* :D

$428 incl p&p to invers, not bad i thought :)

*waits on courier*

so while i wait... what drivers should i get etc?

[DiscoStu]

head on over to www.ati.com and look under the drivers section :p

Make sure to get the "built by ati" drivers if it's a retail ati card, or the "powered by ati" drivers if it's anyone else.

And if you're looking for hacked bioses I'd suggest browsing over the rage3d forums ;)

[BloodDonor]

thanx... think ill pass on the bios hacking for a while ;)

[wimpy]

what brand? and whats this i hear abour molex connectors.

ive got a 320w psu (icute came with the case) and am thinking about upping to a radeon 9500 pro. will this suffice? why would i use a hacked bios (pros/cons)? will our hero batman escape the pit of snakes alive?

sorry bit carried away there...

[fatsanchez]

Originally posted by wimpy
what brand? and whats this i hear abour molex connectors.

ive got a 320w psu (icute came with the case) and am thinking about upping to a radeon 9500 pro. will this suffice? why would i use a hacked bios (pros/cons)? will our hero batman escape the pit of snakes alive?

sorry bit carried away there...

r9500 pro + hacked bios = r9700

[_N_]

>>ive got a 320w psu (icute came with the case) and am thinking about upping to a radeon 9500 pro. will this suffice?

it will work, but don't expect great V's. I just upgraded my icute 320W tonight to a 400W cause I bought a gf4ti4600 and it was sucking all the juice, :D

>>why would i use a hacked bios (pros/cons)?
pro = way better performance, for the price of 9500 you get 9700 radeon
con = risk, depends if you got the balls to try and hack it, if you get it wrong, you can easily screw up the card and never be able to use it again (what about booting with a PCI VGA and flashing it?, or is the card fully wasted if you do a wrong BIOS flash, and you can't do anything?)

>>will our hero batman escape the pit of snakes alive?

well, yes, how else can they make more than one series if he dies in one of them, plus ppl are not interested in seeing the bad guys win, if a good guys win, then the movie is really good, ;) :D :rolleyes:

[BloodDonor]

$438 incl gst & Freight for Powercolor 128MB DDR ATI Radeon 9500 Pro AGP Dual Heads DVI, TVout from ETC Computers

was thinking about the Chaintech ti4200 but this seemed to be a better card ;)

[wimpy]

Excellent, cheers.

Thought the 9500 standard was the hackable one? Might have to investigate this furthur. The powercolor looks like a good buy anyways tho :D!

[Ragnor]

Hmm

I'm pretty sure its only the 9500 128mb NON pro that is hackable to a 9700... something to do with the amount of pipelines, pipelines being disabled etc.

In any case the card is still a great buy, you will have to flash it with a modified bios if you want to overclock the core and memory due to clock speeds being bios locked.

Those Powercolor 9500's are apparently built by ATI and all Powercolor does it put the heatsinks on...

[IronH]

the Radeon 9500 64MB has 4 pixel-pipelines and a 128Mbit memory interface
the Radeon 9500 128MB has 4 pixel-pipelines and a 256Mbit memory interface
the Radeon 9500PRO has 8 pixel-pipelines and a 128Mbit memory interface
the Radeon 9700/PRO have 8 pixel-pipelines and a 256Mbit memory interface

Radeon 9500/9500PRO/9700 ALL run @ 275MHz core and 540MHz mem. Radeon 9700PRO runs @ 325Mhz core and 620Mhz mem.

the Radeon hack works by re-enabling the 4 disabled pixel-pipelines on the Radeon 9500 (non PRO's) giving them a total of 8 pixel-pipelines. Therefore turning a 64MB Radeon 9500 into a 64MB Radeon 9500PRO, and the 128MB Radeon 9500 into a Radeon 9700.

The 128MB Radeon 9500PRO already has all 8 pixel-pipelines enabled so will not benefit from the hack at all. For the 9500PRO to become a 9700 it would need a hack to turn its 128Mbit memory interface into a 256Mbit memory interface, unfortunately there is no such hack.
The only option to make a 9500PRO any faster is by overclocking.

Not to worry though as the hack does not always work, seems to be about a 30% success rate even with cards from same manufacturer & batch.

[BloodDonor]

Originally posted by DiscoStu
head on over to www.ati.com and look under the drivers section :p

Make sure to get the "built by ati" drivers if it's a retail ati card, or the "powered by ati" drivers if it's anyone else.

And if you're looking for hacked bioses I'd suggest browsing over the rage3d forums ;)

so which do i chose with Powercolor? ... powered?

[KingJackal]

Originally posted by BloodDonor
so which do i chose with Powercolor? ... powered?

Yeah, exactly ;).

You'd know if it was made buy ATi:

- big MOFO stickers everywhere saying "MADE BY TEH ATI!!11!1"
- It'd cost about twice as much as any of the other brands of the same card :rolleyes:

;) :p

Of course, they are very nice cards.....

The powered-by ATi cards include:

Gigabyte
Powercolor
Auriga
Hightech
Excalibur
ELSA
...etc

[Westy]

oh KJ the wise and all knowing :D is there much (if any) performance difference between the ATI and powercolor boards? I know the price one is pretty significant ($750 for PC $850 for ATI on pricespy) but is it worth it, lets say watercooled ;)

(im in the market for one :D)

I seem to remember seeing a review awhile back comparing them and i also seem to remember the powercolor getting dicked, but my memory is sketchy at best and ive been trying to find it again (unsuccessfully)

[mird-OC]

i was under the impression that most of the powercolor ati 9x00 cards floating around are infact "built by ati" rebranded.

[Westy]

so what would you do for drivers? Built by ATI or powered by?

[DiscoStu]

You would get the powered by ati if it's not a retail ati card. The hardware is the same but the bioses are different (usually).

[BloodDonor]

thanx... got that sorted..

now whats this 'control panel' thing ati allows u to download as well? :)

[Stove]

Definitely download it. The control panel is the winXP control panel extensions that allow the fiddly bits to be tweaked in the card. e.g. OpenGL settings AA, Aniso etc etc.
IIRC the Ati site warns you that you really really SHOULD install it. I would agree, and I only have the 8500LE

[Geek4Life]

Surely the powered-by drivers are just crippled versions of the built-by drivers.

I'd try them both and make a comparison.

[BloodDonor]

thanx for the info guys...

*starts to stalk the couriers*

i want it NOWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW ;)

[wimpy]

Course costs arrived yesterday, and lo and behold im informed that theres a world wide shortage of 9500 pros from not 1, not 2, but 3 different retailers.

Woe is me T_T

[DiscoStu]

Originally posted by Geek4Life
Surely the powered-by drivers are just crippled versions of the built-by drivers.

I'd try them both and make a comparison.
Powered by drivers are known to cause problems on non retail ati cards.

In other words USE THE RIGHT DRIVERS FOO!!!111