More details about remaking RADEON 9500, 9500 Pro, 9700 and 9700 Pro
It’s not a secret that the yesterday’s information from Overclockers.ru about remaking RADEON 9500 128M caused much hype but still there are details to shed light on. As it turned out, many are confused by the variety of ATI Radeon 9500-9700 boards, asking the same question: what can you remake and what you cannot?
Today Overclockers.ru described all R300-based variants to orient you in their diversity.
- RADEON 9700 Pro: RADEON 9700 PRO feature only 128Mb memory, ATI reference design and 256-bit bus. All 8 pipelines are operable, GPU/memory clock is 325/620MHz. Nothing to remake, only for overclocking.
- RADEON 9700: also feature only 128Mb; design differs slightly from RADEON 9700 Pro, though repeats it sometimes. RADEON 9700 feature 256-bit bus, all 8 pipelines work, leaving nothing to remake. RADEON 9700 have lower clocks — 275/540MHz. The o/c block can be removed by patching into the tweaked BIOS, enabling slightly lower o/c clocks than those of RADEON 9700 Pro.
- RADEON 9500 Pro: feature own design, 128-bit bus, and only 128Mb for now. The memory has two banks like in NVIDIA GeForce Ti4600 and no way you remake RADEON 9500 Pro into 256-bit solution. 8 operable pipelines – nothing to remake. RADEON 9500 Pro GPU/memory clock is 275/540MHz. Overclocking block can be disabled by tweaked BIOS as well.
- RADEON 9500 128MB: all known RADEON 9500 board have RADEON 9700 design. 128Mb RADEON 9500 feature 256-bit bus and the same 8 memory chips identical to RADEON 9700. The RADEON 9500 GPU itself is pared-down with only 4 pipelines left operable. The remake enables all 8 pipelines transforming the GPU into the complete RADEON 9700. The memory bus is left alone as it’s 256-bit already, but besides the re-soldering you will need to repatch RADEON 9500 BIOS for all 8 pipelines to work — RADEON 9700 BIOS fits nice.
- RADEON 9500 64MB: feature the same RADEON 9700 design, but twice fewer memory chips. 64Mb RADEON 9500 cards have 128-bit bus and no way you double it. These cards have RADEON 9500 chips and 4 working pipelines. It’s possible to physically enable all 8 pipelines but, you must also change BIOS to work with the enabled half. Pity, there’s no BIOS found suitable for this purpose. Theoretically, in case of success these boards can be turned into something like RADEON 9500 Pro: 8 pixel pipelines, 128-bit bus. But unlike RADEON 9500 Pro, such 64Mb solutions will not feature 2 memory banks. [Our video section editor, Andrew Vorobyev, said that in order to make a card like R9500Pro 64MB from R9500 64MB (you won´t make R9700 because of the bus) one will need the R9700 BIOS changed for working with another bus and memory.]
The complete story with figures is here(in Russian).
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