9800 to 9800 Pro Conversion

This isn't a new subject here in the Dimension Video forum (see THIS THREAD), but thought I'd pass along my recent experience in doing it. A word of caution right up front--the supply of 9800 non-Pro cards seems to be drying up fast, so you may have considerable difficulty finding one. I got one HERE, but they're sold out now. The best advice I can give you is to poke around in Pricewatch.com.

The conversion requires a 9800 non-Pro card, but NOT the "SE" model, which only has a 128-bit memory bus and won't flash to a Pro. You also need to find one with good quality memory, generally Samsung. Cards with Infineon memory rarely work well with this conversion, since it can't take the speed. Most of the successful reports I saw were for Sapphire cards, and that's what I used, too. If you can find one, expect to pay in the $250 - $300 range. This is still between $50 to $150 less than you'd be paying for a 128MB 9800 Pro card, depending on brand and features, so it's a very attractive deal.

To do the conversion, I just followed the instructions that I found HERE to the letter. Worked like a charm, with no complications at all. Upon reboot after doing the BIOS flash, the card was detected as a 9800 Pro and I reinstalled the Catalyst 3.7 drivers. Rage3D's Radeon Tweak Utility showed the core/memory speeds at 378/337.5, as expected for the Pro (the non-Pro came at 324/290). After running the card at these default speeds to confirm that all was working properly, I began overclocking to see how far I could push the clockspeeds. The highest I could get without seeing fairly substantial visual artifacts was 400/351. Not a big OC on a percentage basis, but this is just gravy on top of the Pro conversion.

I ran a set of five benchmarks on the card in stock, Pro, and OC'ed Pro configurations. Here are the results, along with comparison data for Radeon 9500, 9600, and 9700 cards. Memory clockspeeds are shown doubled, since all of these cards use DDR RAM. Beneath the table are links to bar graphs for each of the five benchmarks:

3DMark03 Graph

3DMark2001 SE Graph

UT2003 Flyby Graph

Quake 3 Arena Graph

GL Excess Graph