Hard Light Productions Forums
Off-Topic Discussion => General Discussion => Topic started by: ZmaN on October 04, 2005, 11:54:44 pm
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im sorry im a pest, but this is my final problem..... I was looking at this card Allstarshop Sapphire Radeon X800GTO2 (http://www.allstarshop.com/shop/product.asp?pid=13003&sid=0FE1QXSK6RVX9P0E13MSM2L6FAU22HBF)....
Notice at the bottom it says that flashing the bios to make it 16 pipelines will void the manufacturers warranty...
is that true or false??
i mean they make it unlockable on purpose (then again, overclockable as well), so why would it void the warranty??? although i supposed if it breaks, i could just flash it back to the original bios and say it never happened.....
more ?'s: 1. do ALL of the sapphire X800GTO's have RV480 cores or not (excluding th GTO2)? 2. should i spend the extra money on a GTO2? if no to question 1, should i go with connect 3D or a sapphire?
THANKS, ZMAN!!!
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Almost certainly to the flashing the BIOS thing. As I understand it, there's a slight possibility of messing up the card (mostly due to something weird happening while it was happening)
Overclocking also breaks most warranties.
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It will, but at that price, who really cares. These GTO2s have been confirmed to have fully functional R480 chips that have passed validation at the X850XT 520mhz speed. ATI wants to clear their inventory of excess R480 cores without screwing up their market. This is one of the best deals in years. I might have gotten one myself if there was an AGP version.
Some (but not all) GTO2s actually have all 16 pipes enabled right out of the box, so no BIOS flash is needed, but this is not guaranteed. In any case, the BIOS flash will give you the pipes. There still hasn't been even one case of the unlocking not working and everyone I've seen has gotten at least 520mhz out of the core.
Not all the GTOs are like this; some have R480s (not necessarily fully functional ones) while others use the R423.
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In either case, you're operating the card outside of the operating range that the warrenty covers. And they can probably tell if that's been done by any damage that may occur (which is really the only reason to worry about the warrenty anyway). Typically computer companies will fab all high-end parts but build in the ability to switch off various components. The ones that make it out without defects get sold as the high-end ones, while the ones that have defects in regions that can be switched off get those regions deactivated and are sold as lower-end parts. Which makes sense, because each fab is expensive as hell to run, and making custom masks for different variants is more expensive than it's worth. The cost of production isn't actually different between different versions of a card, the difference in what you pay for the higher end one is you paying for its fully-functional state; pay less, get a unit with more defects. Simple really.
That's also the reason you can upclock and unlock GPUs to the specs of the top-of-the-line card some of the time. The catch is there's not any assurance that it will work with any given card, or that the operation of the unlocked pipes or whatnot will be 100% correct.
EDIT: Or, as CP points out, it can be done as a marketing decision. If you know that, go for it.
And if you do flash the bios to unlock all of the pipes, it's not necessarily possible to reflash the original BIOS unless you've got it backed up somewhere. A generic one won't necessarily lock the right pipes, if they all have the ability to be disabled.
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In general you should back up the existing BIOS and if something goes wrong, you can use an old PCI card to put the original BIOS back on. This is not quite as important with this particular card though, since the unlocking, if it's even necessary, is guaranteed from everything I'm hearing. (both on forums and hardware sites, like this (http://www.anandtech.com/guides/showdoc.aspx?i=2546&p=3))
Get it off Newegg though. It's $200 there. The price for this thing has been fluctuating quite a bit recently. It's probably going to be a limited release item so you should grab one quickly before they run out of them or stop using the genuine X850XT chips on them.
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The only sure way of doing this is to take the heatsink off and look at the core itself. If you do this, you'll need to take care to choose the correct BIOS to flash onto the card. Note what brand and speed the RAM chips are too. I had to do this when I flashed my 9800Pro to XT, which didnt unlock anything except agressive memory timings and a higher clock speed for the core. I'm not sure on the X800's if the BIOS you want to flash TO has a higher clock speed on those boards. If it does, you will definetly want to overclock your current board to see if it can handle those speeds. I'm sure ATITool will allow you to change the clock speed on your card no problem. Unlocking the pipes is one thing, but if the card cant handle the higher speed, it could be wise to just leave it as is.
Also, watch your temperatures when you OC. If you're getting up there, you'll want to get a better cooler for the core, and possibly a cooler that provides RAM cooling too. If you went as far as OC'in your board, your warranty is already broken, so putting a different cooler on it isnt really going to harm you at all, it will help a lot actually. (comparing Sapphire's basic heatsink to Arctic Cooling's Silencer 3) I'm not up to date on the new cards, but these are some things I had to go through when I flashed my Pro to XT.