9500 pro Built by ati Questions

[Kronik Reloader]

OK , Hey guys whats up ? here is my story.

I finally decided to make the switch from NVIDIA 2 ATI , i got rid of my Old GF4 mx 440 64mb ddr for a brand new ATI radeon 9500pro 128ddr agp8x and dx9.

I installed the drivers that came with the card but honestly the performance is not what i expected . My games only run nice at about 800x600 at 16bit color.

What are the best drivers for this card?
Can i overclock it ? if so how ? because atm the core and memory run at 270mhz each ... is that normal ? Can the 9500pro be modded to a 9700pro level ?

My system specs are this
Asus a7v8x-x board with via kt400 chipset
Amd Athlon xp 2100+
768mb ram of Pc2100
Onboard sound
Lg cd burner 52x24x52
Cd rom
Floppy

Any help would be great

[Darthgary]

The 9500 is a pretty nice card.Should perfrom a heck of a lot better than the GF4MX series!!!

Get the latest Catalyst 3.6 drivers from

http://mirror.ati.com/support/driver...=13&submit.y=1

If you want too overclock your 9500 Pro use Powerstrip
http://www.entechtaiwan.com/ps.htm

[Darthgary]

as far as I know now, adays ATI uses Firmware on the 9500's to prevent them from overclocking to the 9700's GPU clock speed and memory. With most 3rd party 9500 Pro manufactores like Saphire or crucial does not have the firmare.

But with your ATI Radeon 9500, you should be able to OC a little.
try using 3D mark{http://download.com.com/3001-2121-5122338.html} to test your speeds, when OCing, if you notice the textures getting a little glitchy or jaggy, then your probally overclocking a little higher then the card will handle!

[Kronik Reloader]

Thanks alot for your help , any thing else i should know , plz let me know :P

[Nighthawk]

Did you install the Via Hyperions? Those would probably increase your performance if you haven't already installed them. http://www.viaarena.com/?PageID=300

[Darthgary]

Yeah they will help aslo.

[Kronik Reloader]

I will install em in 2 min ,

when i try to use powerstrip to O\C , as soon as i move the core or memory , my computer restarts , any ideas?

[rastorize]

The 9500 pro is locked...ATI locks the bios so I don't think you can use Powerstrip to overclock it...I tried it and it locked up my games. I use Rage3D Tweak
If you want to overclock head over and grab the warp11 Bios here or here which will unlock your card and re-enable the 4 additional rendering pipelines that ATI locked out. You can get the thing to near 9700 pro levels with some tweaking. Right now, your 9500 pro has 4 rendering pipelines enabled, but it physically has the same amount as a 9700 pro (8)...but ATI disabled them and clocked down the 9500 pro to be able to sell it as a mid-range card without creating a whole new card. The 9600 pro, it's replacement, has only 4 physical pipelines...is a completely new card...and has no bios mods or pipelines to unlock, but runs at higher clock speeds stock to make up the difference. A modded 9500 pro using the bios mod becomes a 9700 pro...although it still is limited by 128 bit wide memory bus...can't fix that...the 9700 pro has 256 bit wide bus. But with the bios unlocked, you can then overclock the card easily to that of a 9700 pro...I've gotten mine up to 351MHz Core and 301MHz memory...up from around 275MHz...

Here's more info on the bios mod:
http://firingsquad.gamers.com/hardwa...ck/default.asp

http://www.envynews.com/index.php?ID=398&page=2

Remember, you could hose your card by messing with the bios. I did it to my Sapphire Radeon 9500 pro and it worked great...hopefully it will on yours too if you try it.

[Kronik Reloader]

im gonna try that tomorrow , i will use tonight to read up on it so that i dont mess up

[Darthgary]

You will be able to OC using PS, but the results would be minimum.

I just wish there was a way to OC my dinky little Radeon 9000 Pro!