Hay guys, I had a quick question for y'all.

I was looking for a new passively cooled video card (yup, silent machine) to replace my passively cooled X700 Pro. It's getting really quite dated and it tends to stumble in FEAR and the newer games. Finding a passively cooled AGP card with any balls is a little bit tough though. I did however find a passive 7600 GS.

Looking at the 7600 GS vs. the X700 Pro on tom's VGA charts, the 7600 GS only leads by an average of 5 FPS or 300 3DMarks. That's not a good return on a $140 investment!

My question is this...has anybody heard of re-flashing the 7600 GS to become a 7600 GT? The GS has all of it's pipelines crippled except for the vertex shader units I think. I could have sworn that I had heard about this before, but I can't find any references to it so far. Can anybody recall anything about reflashing the 7600 GS?

I couldn't find anything to suggest it can be done. I found a couple of posts at the EOC forums saying it can't be done. Of course, that's not a definitive answer.

I think its only the 7900GS than can be flashed to a 7900GT.

I thought the 7600GS and GT differed in their memory layout; the GS used GDDR2 and the GT GDDR3 or something.

Reflux I think you're right, that must be it. I think Asus made a silent 7900 GS...too bad it would heat up my case too badly! Oh well, thanks everyone!

If you have Pci-e, XFX made a 7600 GS with a passive heatsink on it.

Link

Many people made fanless 7600GS. Mine is a Gigabyte; it had a distinctive cooler with a heat-pipe and runs fanless at temperatures comparable to my old 6800LE with a Zalman VF700-Cu cooler on it. The clock is 450/800. I'd put the VF700 on the 7600, but I like fanless quietness.