Brad Grenz
01-15-2003, 11:13 PM
Well, I got the 128 MB Sapphire Radeon 9500 I ordered from Neweeg.com
today as I expected. It did indeed come built on the 9700 PCB with
3.3 ns Infineon RAM chips situated above and to the right of the GPU.
For frame of reference I ran 3D Mark 2001 SE on my system before
pulling out the GF2 MX 400 I had and installing the Radeon.
Test System: 1.4 Ghz Athlon, 256 MB PC2100 DDR on a Shuttle AK31 3.1
mobo (Kt266a). Running WinXP SP1. Game Theater XP sound card, generic
PCI firewire card. Couple of 7200 HDDs. 32x12x48 CD-R/RW.
With the GeForce 2 MX 400, 64 MB SDR:
3D Marks: 2786
Single Texture Fill: 187.4 MTexels
Multi Texture Fill: 351.8 MTexels
Installed the 9500 with stock drivers. Ran the bench and got the
following scores:
3D Marks: 9119
Single Texture Fill: 912.9 MTexels
Multi Texture Fill: 1104.5 MTexels
Pretty good jump just running in spec. Plus I finally saw all the
pixel shader tests!
Next I got to trying the soft mods. First I tried the RivaTuner app
which can be downloaded from Guru3D.com. Realized it couldn't modify
already installed drivers because of XP's protective qualities. Next I
gave the W!zzard modded driver which can be had from this site:
http://www.maxdownloads.com/~ian/wizzard/
I just replaced the proper file and renamed it with the .sy_ extension
and let the ATI driver install go. I rebooted and benched the system
again but saw no change. Finally I did exactly what the instructions
say and uninstalled the drivers, left the modified file with a .sys
file extension and used XP's built in driver installation system,
choosing from a list, clicking have disk, etc. This time I hit pay
dirt. Here are the post mod bench marks:
3D Marks: 10373
Single Texture Fill: 1548 MTexels
Multi Texture Fill: 2173 MTexels
I get no artifacts in any of the 3D Mark tests, or the ATI DX9 demos
(Bear, etc.) No checkerboard effect, no missing pixels. Things are
pretty damn good for a $160 upgrade. I haven't tested any games yet,
or done any overclocking yet, but I'll keep you guys posted if I run
into any issues/astonishing success.
today as I expected. It did indeed come built on the 9700 PCB with
3.3 ns Infineon RAM chips situated above and to the right of the GPU.
For frame of reference I ran 3D Mark 2001 SE on my system before
pulling out the GF2 MX 400 I had and installing the Radeon.
Test System: 1.4 Ghz Athlon, 256 MB PC2100 DDR on a Shuttle AK31 3.1
mobo (Kt266a). Running WinXP SP1. Game Theater XP sound card, generic
PCI firewire card. Couple of 7200 HDDs. 32x12x48 CD-R/RW.
With the GeForce 2 MX 400, 64 MB SDR:
3D Marks: 2786
Single Texture Fill: 187.4 MTexels
Multi Texture Fill: 351.8 MTexels
Installed the 9500 with stock drivers. Ran the bench and got the
following scores:
3D Marks: 9119
Single Texture Fill: 912.9 MTexels
Multi Texture Fill: 1104.5 MTexels
Pretty good jump just running in spec. Plus I finally saw all the
pixel shader tests!
Next I got to trying the soft mods. First I tried the RivaTuner app
which can be downloaded from Guru3D.com. Realized it couldn't modify
already installed drivers because of XP's protective qualities. Next I
gave the W!zzard modded driver which can be had from this site:
http://www.maxdownloads.com/~ian/wizzard/
I just replaced the proper file and renamed it with the .sy_ extension
and let the ATI driver install go. I rebooted and benched the system
again but saw no change. Finally I did exactly what the instructions
say and uninstalled the drivers, left the modified file with a .sys
file extension and used XP's built in driver installation system,
choosing from a list, clicking have disk, etc. This time I hit pay
dirt. Here are the post mod bench marks:
3D Marks: 10373
Single Texture Fill: 1548 MTexels
Multi Texture Fill: 2173 MTexels
I get no artifacts in any of the 3D Mark tests, or the ATI DX9 demos
(Bear, etc.) No checkerboard effect, no missing pixels. Things are
pretty damn good for a $160 upgrade. I haven't tested any games yet,
or done any overclocking yet, but I'll keep you guys posted if I run
into any issues/astonishing success.