Warp11's
Bio's Update Info (cut and pasted from his site)
I did a comparison of the 9700Pro BIOS, the 9700 non-pro
BIOS, and the 9500Pro BIOS and was able to find the one hexidecimal
value that is keeping the 9500Pro and 9700 non-pro from overclocking.
Address Line: 00000070h
Originally: 44 76 4E 37 91 08 02 10 02 00 00 00 00 00 00
00
Edited: 44 76 4E 37 90 08 02 10
02 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
ATi is setting the same hex value on the 9500Pro and 9700 non-pro
cards to keep them from overclocking. I tested this change
on both a 9700 non-pro and 9500Pro and it works. All of
the overclocking utilities functioned correctly...Rage3D Tweak
worked great with the new BIOS!
You may need to uninstall/reinstall your ATi Drivers and Control
Panel.
The reasoning behind these BIOS's:
The Radeon9700Pro,
9700non-pro, and 9500Pro all share the same R300 GPU.
The 9700Pro
and 9700non-pro are virtually identical, albeit with different
memory.
ATi chose
to give the 9700Pro Device ID: 0x4E44
ATi chose to give the 9700non-pro Device ID : 0x4E45
The question
I asked myself was why did ATi do this? Virtually identical
hardware that share EXACTLY the same drivers!
The only
logical conclusion was that they wanted to lock all of the cards
with Device ID: 0x4E45
The 9700non-pro
and 9500Pro both share Device ID: 0x4E45 even though they DO
have a significant hardware difference (the memory bus width).
I chose
to give all cards with the R300 GPU the same Device ID that
the unlocked 9700Pro has...0x4E44.
There are
no illl effects to doing this! The cards share the same driver
set.
I think
of it like this...if the 9700Pro=9700non-pro and the 9700non-pro=9500Pro
(based on having the same Device ID), then the 9700Pro=9500Pro.
This equivalence is based from a Device ID/driver standpoint!
Could ATi
start locking Device ID: 0x4E44? Of course they could, but that
would mean a FULL lockdown of every card that they currently
produce. If they did this, it would be too blatantly obvious
what they were up to. I don't think they would risk that kind
of bad PR.
"Won't
it be a matter of time before someone finds out the inf option
that enables the clock locking in the first place?" Possibly,
but it hasn't happened yet and everyone that makes an overclocking
utility has certainly been trying. The problem with correcting
this issue from the software side of it, is that ATi could easily
change things around in each driver set that they release...ATi
controls the software, but they can't change the BIOS on your
hardware. Unless ATi goes into FULL lockdown mode, this BIOS
fix will work.
I hope that
everyone understands my reasoning behind what has been done
to correct this BIOS issue.
I didn't
need to make any significant changes to the 9500Pro BIOS to
get it working. I actually did it while drinking my morning
coffee