I dunno... I was bored... I was googling my way around after hearing AntiM talk about soft modding the 9500's into a 9700... does that mean plain 9500's? specific pcb's? no love for me and my card outside of a resistor and a soldering gun? I was kinda hoping all I'd have to do was find a bios to flash over mine and bump it up a couple notches on the spectrum... but now I hear that won't happen anytime soon... or something. Every bit of info I have is conflicted with another bit of info from somewhere else....

Anyone know the facts about this? I'm always looking for a couple extra frames here and there...

All right, your post seems a bit unclear to me. From what I have heard, there is no way to get the non-pro 9500 to act as a 9700. Now, for the 9500 PRO, you have two choices. One is an actual hardware mod, while the other is a software mod. The hardware mod involves you actually desoldering and resoldering resistors onto the PCB. The software mod in theory does the same thing, but through a patch. This patch is obviously not approved by ATI and so is used at your own risk. But, you can uninstall it. It does not have a 100% effectiveness rating. If you do plan on modding your card, then try the software first to see if that works, because there is no use in ripping up your hardware if software works fine. In benchmarks, both the hardware and software modded versions ran pretty close, but I'm pretty sure the hardware beat it out by a couple in every test. Ill see if I can find the link.

Doods
Its the 9500 non-pro that the hardware mod works for. Some of the 9500non-pros were produced on an early run using 9700 boards and putting a resistor in a different position.
The article hit PR about 4 mos ago. it's here somwhere.
BulletPC also sold them pre-modded, about 2mos ago they had 35 of them. for 2 bills, I got 1,Here is the link
[http://www.pcapex.com/modules.php?s=...icle&artid=108]

I hafta agree, from what I've read it's the 9500 non pro.....

http://duhvoodooman.com/9500mod/9500mod_1.htm

http://www.maxdownloads.com/~ian/wizzard/

http://reviews.designtechnica.com/print_guide13.html

I must have my sources mixed up. Allright then, I was wrong. That is, unless they were both wrong.

So basically I'm stuck with the clocks I have too? No GFX OC down the road a bit?

Zen, I know it was the Sapphire 9500 non-pro with the "L" shaped memory that could be turned into a 9700, I got one from Bullet PC also. But I loaded the Cat 3.2 and I don't know if I never noticed it before, but it is recognized as a 9700 Pro.

Is yours recognized as a 9700 or a 9700 Pro?

Alright, another question:
What's a good number to go by when overclocking a radeon, as in... go up in 2's, 5's whatever... I know for CPU's its 5's... at least, that's the general consensus I get from browsing around... what's the one for radeons?