Radeon 9800 Pro to XT hack

Written by ZackG

Saturday, 09 April 2005

When ATI released the the Radeon 9800 XT, they started making the Radeon 9800 Pro with the same core, which is the R360. This is what makes a 9800 Pro essentially an underclocked 9800 XT. 1. First you need to determine whether or not your 9800 Pro has the older, R350 core or the newer, R360 core. Of the two, only the R360 core can be made into a 9800 XT. To figure out which of the two you have, count the memory chips on your board. If you have 16, it has the R350 core and CANNOT be transformed, however if it has only 8 memory chips, it is using the R360 core and CAN be converted to the XT. 2. You will need a program called Flashrom, which is available here in the downloads section of i-hacked. You also need to download a Radeon 9800 XT BIOS for the same brand of card, the same memory capacity(128 MB or 256 MB), and preferrably of the same memory brand(Hynix, Samsung, etc) and speed(2.5 ns, 2.8 ns). For example, if you currently have a Sapphire Radeon 9800 Pro with 256 MB of 2.8 ns Samsung memory, download the BIOS of a Sapphire Radeon 9800 XT with 256 MB of 2.8 ns Samsung memory. You can find a full list of BIOS to download at any of these three links: http://www.techpowerup.com/bios/?search=9800+xt&Submit=Search#flas http://my.tbaytel.net/panthor/bioses.htm http://www.mvktech.net/download.php 3. Copy Flashrom and the BIOS(with the .bin extension) to a bootable floppy disk and reboot your computer with the floppy in the drive. Enter the following command to backup your video card's current BIOS to the floppy: Flashrom -s 0 backup.bin Now apply the new BIOS with the following command: Flashrom -f -p 0 name_of_the_file.bin Enter the name of the BIOS file you downloaded in place of the "name_of_the_file.bin" If the screen becomes fuzzy during the upgrade, don't worry. Be patient and wait until the image returns to the DOS prompt with theconfirmation of the upgrade. Restart your computer and you're done! 4. If after the upgrade, your card is recognized as a Radeon 9800 XT, but the image is fuzzy when playing 3D games, you need to edit the BIOS to reduce the memory clock to 350 MHz. The reason for this is that 2.8 ns memory cannot run at clocks higher than 350 MHz. To edit the BIOS, download the radedit program and open the .bin file of the Radeon 9800 XT BIOS you downloaded. Just change the memory clock from 365 to the maximum speed of the memory, which would be 350 MHz for 2.8 ns memory, and save. Do a new upgrade as explained in step 3, and all is well. 5. If anything goes wrong during the upgrade, you can revert to the old BIOS by booting from a floppy and using the following command: Flashrom -f -p 0 backup.bin

Last Updated ( Monday, 13 February 2006 )