RussianSensation
Elite Member
- Sep 5, 2003
- 19,458
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No, you couldn't because the only difference between 9500pro and 9700pro was bus width you must have mistaken a regular 9500 with 9500 pro. A vanilla 9500 had 4 pipelines and 256 bit bus, it used the same chip as 9700pro so half the pipelines were disabled.
BTW. If I remember correctly there was a time when you could buy some version of 5900 for the price of 9600pro and it wasn't a bad deal at all. .
I am too lazy to dig up into much depth on 9500pro flashing but I think it was possible to get 9700 level of performance with the flash, even though it wouldn't be as fast as the actual 9700pro without overclocking:
http://gotoanswer.stanford.edu/benefits_of_flashing_9500_pro_to_9700_pro_-2283710/
http://www.techimo.com/forum/graphics-cards-displays/113087-ati-9500-pro-bios-flash-9700-pro.html
Other sites report you needed the $150-175 4 pipeline 9500 NP 128MB to turn into a $275-325 9700Pro:
http://www.digitaltrends.com/how-to/turn-your-radeon-9500-into-a-9700/
The main point is NV's 5000 series was getting killed in both the high and low end.
As far as 5900XT/Ultra costing as little as a 9600pro, I don't ever recall that in Canada or US. This is probably your market specific situation. Also, X1950XT was faster than any 7900 series so I am not sure about your last point. By the time shader intensive games started coming out, I remember vividly how much junk 7900 GTO/GTX series became. My primary buying choice narrowed down to the X1950XTX and 8800GTS. I went with the latter but 7900GTX/GTO wasn't even on the table because 8600GTS beat 7900GTX in COD:MW1; that's how bad it got for the GeForce 7.
If GeForce 5 was the worst of all NV generations, GF7 is a close 2nd. It also has inferior 2D and 3D IQ to ATI. By the end of 2011, 7900GTX's performance got so bad, X1800XT outperformed it and when you turned AA filters on, 7900GTX was a disaster!
http://www.computerbase.de/2011-10/bericht-grafikkarten-evolution/3/
The 2 generations to skip from NV were easily GF5 and 7. They plain sucked like 2900XT/3800 series from AMD.
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