Sapphire Radeon 9500 128 mb non-Pro 160.00 SHIPPED at Newegg

[GoGoPa]

Got mine today, red version. Did soft9700, no artifacts so far but tested only in 3d2001. 10900 on 1700+ @ 1.6G.

 

[civh]

Got mine yesterday. Did the softmod and no checkerboard. Only see artifacts on the single texture fill rate test. It is a mesh of lighter strips in this pattern.

I I I I I
I I I I I
I I I I I

This pattern extend all through the screen. Any idea what it could be. Again this is only noticed in the single texture fill rate test. Everything else was perfect.

 

[sambao21]

sounds like newegg goofed and sent out the black pcb to people that ordered the red one. im just gonna wait until the next round of red ones.

 

[azoomee]

Any of you super-pros out there:

I'm doing the upgrade and it continues to lock up my system. I think the problem may be that I don't see the tweak for windows XP, only for windows 9X and windows NT. Where are the tweaks/drivers for NT to do the upgrade?

 

[Vrangel]

Originally posted by: azoomee
I don't see the tweak for windows XP

Here you go for XP. Or do you need it for NT ? Your post is kinda confusing.

 

[Str8UpKiller]

got mine today. It was red L shaped. I successfully performed the mod but did get very minor artifacts. The card oc'd easily to 330/300. I probably could have gone further however didnt' because it wasn't really increasing my 3dmarks very much. I'm going to return it though because artificats no matter how small aren't tolerable to me.

One other thing is odd is that with an xp2100 processor and 512 ram with the modded 9500-->9800 I only got a max 3dmark of 8100. Something is wrong because I should be getting over 10k!

 

[Tipnmo101]

Originally posted by: Str8UpKiller

One other thing is odd is that with an xp2100 processor and 512 ram with the modded 9500-->9800 I only got a max 3dmark of 8100. Something is wrong because I should be getting over 10k!

with an xp2400 i got in the 9000... which i thought was odd also....

 

[Mark]

ive been thinking of just rma'ing the card and getting something totally else(like 9500 pro) cause you gotta be thinking newegg is just recycling these 9500's to the consumers. i could request them to send me the red card but i'd just be getting another card that someone else took back because it wasn't hackable. theres no way of us knowing if they're sending us tested or untested cards.

 

[clarkmo]

Originally posted by: Tipnmo101

Originally posted by: Str8UpKiller

One other thing is odd is that with an xp2100 processor and 512 ram with the modded 9500-->9800 I only got a max 3dmark of 8100. Something is wrong because I should be getting over 10k!

with an xp2400 i got in the 9000... which i thought was odd also....

You sure you didn't use the 9500 - 9800 4 pipeline hack? At any rate, I get ovet 14000 3dmarks with the 9500-9700. Haven't seen an artifact yet, knock on wood, but I haven't tried the Doom demo either, just 3dmark and AOM. Needless to say, WOOT!

 

[Sarcophaguy]

I spoke to a CSR at Newegg about what happens to returned cards, and he said they don't get repackaged, they get sent back to Sapphire. Though in my case I have artifacts at bootup, so my card is being treated as defective. Hopefully nobody here will get my card!

 

[StayPuff]

I ordered the red card last friday and received it yesterday (got red L-shaped card).

I performed the hack and see pick checkerboarding over the light colored textures. In addition to that, in greenish textures (like those found in 3dmark2k1's nature scene) I get bright green dots (are those artifacts?). I've tried all three hacks of the Wizzard's hacked 3.2 Catalyst drivers.

Also from within Windows (XP), I get pink dots on many of the pushbuttons. Click HERE for an example of that (on the list all modes button).

Has anyone seen a solution for that? This is on an ASUS A7N8X (non-deluxe) with a 1700+ clock at 1666MHz.

 

[sundog29]

Originally posted by: StayPuff
I ordered the red card last friday and received it yesterday (got red L-shaped card). ...

Ordered a red one early Saturday, and it was reportedly in stock all weekend. When it didn't ship until Tuesday, and also went OOS, I anticipated an event.

Just received a black one in an anti-static bag inexplicably bearing a red 9500 SKU (#14-102-271). Curiously, 16 capacitors have a purple felt-tip line across them. Although it's on its way back untouched, was this product the bulk OEM black card (#14-102-252)?

 

[StayPuff]

Originally posted by: sundog29

Originally posted by: StayPuff
I ordered the red card last friday and received it yesterday (got red L-shaped card). ...

Ordered a red one early Saturday, and it was reportedly in stock all weekend. When it didn't ship until Tuesday, and also went OOS, I anticipated an event.

Just received a black one in an anti-static bag inexplicably bearing a red 9500 SKU (#14-102-271). Curiously, 16 capacitors have a purple felt-tip line across them. Although it's on its way back untouched, was this product the bulk OEM black card (#14-102-252)?

My caps have those same markings. Wierd.

 

[Kung Lau]

Originally posted by: Sarcophaguy
I spoke to a CSR at Newegg about what happens to returned cards, and he said they don't get repackaged, they get sent back to Sapphire. Though in my case I have artifacts at bootup, so my card is being treated as defective. Hopefully nobody here will get my card!

Unfortunately, my red L card also showed small artifacts on boot up. Especially noticeable on the black XP boot screen. The mod wasn't even a consideration.
RMA'd immediately. This must be a batch of poorest quality out there. I did manage to pick up a refurb 9500 pro (ATI) though. Hopefully, that one wasn't a dud too.

 

[Vrangel]

Another black one here. Ordered on Sunday and it wasnt shipped till Wednesday.
Says RED on the invoice, yeah right. Got RMA # for it, newegg guy said they dont carry reds anymore.

Anyway, who sells red one reliably these days ? Allstarshop seems to have it but its $173.

 

[Killrose]

Originally posted by: civh
Got mine yesterday. Did the softmod and no checkerboard. Only see artifacts on the single texture fill rate test. It is a mesh of lighter strips in this pattern.

I I I I I
I I I I I
I I I I I

This pattern extend all through the screen. Any idea what it could be. Again this is only noticed in the single texture fill rate test. Everything else was perfect.

Make sure you don't try and clock the ram much more over 295MHz. If I go over 297MHz, in some apps after some case heat added, I get the same thing.

 

[azoomee]

Originally posted by: Vrangel

Originally posted by: azoomee
I don't see the tweak for windows XP

Here you go for XP. Or do you need it for NT ? Your post is kinda confusing.

Do I run the 8040c program first then replace the ati2mtag?

 

[Vrangel]

Azoomee,
cant help you man, I've got black one good only for RMA, see post above.

 

[clarkmo]

Originally posted by: azoomee

Originally posted by: Vrangel

Originally posted by: azoomee
I don't see the tweak for windows XP

Here you go for XP. Or do you need it for NT ? Your post is kinda confusing.

Do I run the 8040c program first then replace the ati2mtag?

You run the driver installation program, cancelling after the drivers are extracted to the hard drive.Before the extraction you can select the location or just use the default. One way of doing it is to first change the vga drivers for *both* entries to standard vga in the hardware manager. Move the hacked atimag to where you extracted the files and update the drivers I renamed mine with the extension .dl_ as that's how the others were named. Reboot. You may be able to select the driver location when XP rediscovers your hardware. Be sure to update the drivers for both entries in the hardware manager.

 

[markrb]

Which forum (at amdmb.com) were they talking about it?

Sorry haven't been around lately.
I thought that the Video cards forum and inside that the ATI forum would be obvious.

Search "9500 Mod". There is one thread with almost 250 responses. That is a good one to read.

Mark

 

[iguanaman]

As I said in my earlier post, the 9500np's seems to have a variety of flaws that may cause artifacts. I found that my card artifacts only when doing volume texturing. I can remove it entirely in D3D by disabling it with Rage3D tweak. I would suggest that everyone with minor artifacting to try disabling hardware features one by one with R3D Tweak and see if you can isolate the problem. In my case I have not seen much of a performance hit with volume textures disabled and I am probably going to keep my card.

 

[TalonFyre]

Got mine this past Wednesday - Radeon 9500 Non-Pro Red L-Shape Mem from Newegg.com.

Softmod works (Wizzard's patched 9500->9800 ati2mtag.sys file).

3DMark2001SE's Fill rate test gets ~1800 single/~2500 multi-texturing.

The Card came unlocked and I'm running at 325/300 with no problems.

One curious problem when I first got the card though, I had this annoying problem whenever I played back a movie file. It didn't matter what format it was in (.mov, .wmv, .divx, .avi, ...) or what player I used, the video would stutter every once in a while and would get "stuck" on the same frame for a split-second while the sound looped over that split-second. Very annoying. And then it happened more and more often. Also, PowerDVD would display some garbled screen whenever I tried to play a DVD and crash my system resulting in blue screen of death.

Finally, I went through a bunch of troubleshooting - reinstalling drivers, unhacking drivers, changing video overlay settings, AA and Anis settings, reordering PCI cards, trying to reassign IRQ's. I finally got it down to the sound card drivers. I was using Creative's latest drivers and when I switched back to Windows XP's WDM drivers, everything was fixed. For PowerDVD, I had to turn off Hardware Acceleration in the video options (this is PowerDVD 4.0).

I don't know how the sound drivers could relate to the video problem...or why the movie file playback issue arose when I installed my new card (an upgrade from my GF3 Ti 200). The IRQ's were not the same in either case. Well, just reporting this in case others have the same problem.

 

[Amp]

sapphire radeon 9500np's come unlocked... so overclocking shouldn't be a problem.

i've gone through 2 cards and even if the true 9700pro softmod can't be done without artifacting, you should at least do the >9800 (4 pipelines) softmod per w1zzard's page. doesn't seem to do too much with lower settings, but turn up AA and aniso and the card performs really well. imo, probably even better than a 9500pro. then there's always overclocking a bit to max out your card's performance.

as for sticking with an artifacting modded 9500np, it's definitely worth it if you unmod it and try the newest 4pipe mod i mentioned... people shouldn't get hung up on the fact that it doesn't say PRO at the end. it's a great card (256bit ram).


also, for people who've had artifacts only after softmodding to the 9700, did anyone try freezing the card. there have been a few cases where that either reduced the number of artifacts or even removed them completely.

either way, this card is definitely a champ for the price... gotta love that red pcb =)


EDIT: prolonged oc'ing the ram to more than 300 w/o ramsinks isn't too wise, chop up an old cpu heatsink if you really want to push the ram that much... from experience, it'll cause random crashes and who knows what in the long run

 

[Mark]

Originally posted by: Vrangel
Another black one here. Ordered on Sunday and it wasnt shipped till Wednesday.
Says RED on the invoice, yeah right. Got RMA # for it, newegg guy said they dont carry reds anymore.

i just sent back mines today and in my customer comment, i told them to send me the red verwsion very clearly. if they dont carry anymore, anyone know what newegg will do in this type of situation?

 

[sundog29]

Originally posted by: Mark

Originally posted by: Vrangel
Another black one here. Ordered on Sunday and it wasnt shipped till Wednesday.
Says RED on the invoice, yeah right. Got RMA # for it, newegg guy said they dont carry reds anymore.

i just sent back mines today and in my customer comment, i told them to send me the red verwsion very clearly. if they dont carry anymore, anyone know what newegg will do in this type of situation?

A full credit and $10 to cover return shipping.