In need of a new graphics card....

[caravel]

Ok so I received the Sapphire Radeon 9800 128MB AGP non-pro yesterday. I was getting it confused with the 9800SE at first, hence my reference to the softmod in the previous post. It is not necessary to softmod or hardmod this card as all 8 pipelines are functioning normally. The 9800SE, the cripple, has only 4 pipelines functioning. The rest are disabled because the core is basically defective, though often they can be softmodded or hardmodded and got working on the full 8 pipelines anyway, etc etc etc (the usual). With the 9800 non-pro it is only necessary to overclock. The success of this depends on the memory type on the board, and the quality of the GPU cooler (not bad in this case). The samsung memory is the better type, the infineon memory which is more common doesn't usually overclock as well, but in some cases can do almost as well as the samsung (though not often). I have the infineon DDR SGRAM, and have managed to get it up to Pro speeds without artifacts. Performance is still rather poor though, worse in fact than the 9000 under WinXP. I'm not entirely sure what's causing this but I'm getting rid of Win98SE tonight and reinstalling XP/SP2. Then I will be able to use ATITool again also.