Will the ATI X800 Pro be the next 9500 (in terms of pipeline hacks)?

U

Urraca

Gawd
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Soon after the arrival of the 9500 it was discovered that via a hard/soft mod that it was possible to open up 'unused' text pipelines to basically give you a 9700 with 8x pipes.

According to the news on the [H]ard front page, the x800 Pro has 12x pipes and the XT has the 16. So do you think that ATI has learned from their 'mistakes' and worked on a way of securing the other pipes? Or do you think it will be moddable, making it a real hot enthusiast card. So will this be possible on this generation of cards, or is it too early to tell?

This of course is all assuming that the 2 cards are built on virtually the same platform, one utilizing all the pipelines and different ram, and the other one being limited from it's full potential? Or hell, maybe in it's original incarnation, it was only 12x but after seeing the nVidia prospects ATI decided to at the last minute bump both cards to the 16x lines (as many rumors suggested).
 
Only asking because I thought ATI might have said somthing in the past (ie when 9500s production was stopped) that they will try to prevent this in future cards. So just inquiring if they ever released a statement similiar to that.
 
Originally posted by TommyW
I think x800se will be the nxt gen softmoding monster :p
Click to expand...

Yes, but clearly inferior hardware wise :) 128mb less ram, slower ram. And 200mhz slower, which probally means it will come with inferior active/passive cooling.
 
Don't forget it has a 128bit memory bus. Also I kind of doubt that the success rate is going to be too high, what with 8 pipelines dissabled (usually for a reason), the odds of one of them being bad are pretty high.
 
As i know 9800se didnt have hyperzIII and 4piplines opend...

the same here i think... :eek:

about the cooling is not a big problam buy a better cooling

system... :)
 
My brains tell me the X800SE is pretty much just gonna be an oc'ed 9500pro, possibly made on the new fabrication.

8 pipelines with 128megs of memory on a 128-bit datapath sounds awfully familiar. Shader optimizations might be there, but we'll see.
 
True, but apart from the extra pipelines and higher clockspeed, there are no other "features" in the core.

Edit: Whoops, there are 2 extra vertex shader units. But methinks the 128-bit bus is a very big limitation.
 
The X800 Pro on the 420 core will have 12 pipelines and only 12, X800 XT one the 420 core will have 16 pipelines and only 16, (this is what I think), like the 9600 xt is on the 360 core but only has 4 pipelines the 9800 xt is on the 360 core and only has 8 pipelines.
 
I'll be peeved if the R420 turns out to be a dual slot card as well, and if it requires two power connectors. :rolleyes:

But anyway...

Does anyone happen to know when we will be hearing anything more about the R420?
Are they planning an event like nVidia did today?
 
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