X800Pro mod to X800XT

I was gonna say that!

I've heard their yields have been exceptionally good, that's why I'm so excited that this may work.

 

You don't think that Ati would rather sell it as a XT then a Pro if all pipes actually worked ? (Or perhaps another version with 16 pipes, lower clock)

 

Just an assumption on my part. However, if they did have qty of XT capable chips, they would be in the channel. By the very nature of them being a higher binned part there is going to be less of them, and therefore take longer to build up a stock of them to start shipping.

 

Its no different then almost ever chip to come out.

The chips are the same chip they and acually have to spend alittle more money on the Pros to try and handicap them like this.

They know no one would buy the XT version if the Pros had 16 pipelines and could run the same clock, so they have to try and kill part of the chip so they can make there extra hundo$.

Im sure the most of the pros can hit XT speeds they are just probley holding back on the best ones to make sure they have a good run of XT when they come out.

Its kinda like dog breeding. The good puppys get to keep there balls to be the studs and the bad puppys get there pipelines cut off

Speaking of balls, whats up with the guy saying a pencil wont conduct. There 5 million sites that show thats the way overclocking was done. Jezzz

 

I'm Flabbergasted!

 

Or it could be they are having trouble getting enough memory to release the XT in any quantity.

Mark

 

It depends on if they feel that the profit from the quantity of cheaper Pros they sell may exceed the profit from sales of more expensive XTs. The XTs will certainly earn them more per sale, but the revenue from individual sales of an item is much less significant than the revenue from total sales of an item over a period of time.

 

Xbit

So they had no luck and 1/2/3/4 pipelines of the disabled quad didn't work? Or is it impossible to use the mod?

 

Well there is a cost associated with releasing another board, extra packaging, marketing etc. Some of the people who may have bought a 16 pipe XT could instead be buying a lower clocked 16pipe card, so another board doesn't necessarily generate more revenue for them.

Or it could be they never planned to release them until a certain time for marketing reasons, or that they are waiting on enough higher speed ram. Obviously there is going to be more cards that qualify as pro than XT as any chip which could be an XT could also be a pro.

There haven't been a ton of X800Pro cards in the retail channel yet either, does this mean they have horrible yields? Or perhaps it means a high percentage of the parts are binning as XT and they don't want to ship them on lower priced pro boards. Or most likely, they only started production a couple of weeks ago and they and their AiB partners haven't ramped up to full production just yet.

 

A Finnish HW-site Muropaketti.com has an article about R420 launch and apparently some Ati guy told them that modding Pro to XT is possible, but it'll a little bit more difficult this time.

 

Not everybody could buy an XT. So instead of having an XT that nobody will buy, they'd rather have a Pro that somebody WOULD buy. It's not an unheard of idea, Intel and AMD have been doing this with their CPUs for a long time now.

 

I was thinking it's also possible they could use a serial interface like an I2C bus to get at a few bytes of nvram and hard code it that way. Similar to how they lock mulitpliers on CPUs these days. Wouldn't be suprised if we start seeing that here in the near future if they're not doing it already.

 

I had a go at this last night with bios flashes, pencil, conductive paint etc and it was a no go. Same result as x-bit.

 

101:
That would be one way. Or they could put it in the BIOS flash, and not reprogram that block with the BIOS flashing utillity.
Or how about some on-chip fuses.

 

Just noticed this.

I suppose that it can be done.

 

Mod guide:

http://www.pcunleash.com/bbs/zboard...select_arrange=headnum&desc=asc&no=26

 

El bigo thread: http://www.rage3d.org/board/showthread.php?s=3c9f597469d3e935a26307daa48004ea&threadid=33761006

 

I really cannot agree with this in this context. If they had such great yields they could sell it for $20 more than the pro and make barrels of money, or at least $20 more I mean who wouldn't buy it for a small amount more and if everything is so peachy they could easily do it. I am not saying there isn't a few people who have a pro that is really an xt, just that I do not think it is so pervasive, if it truly was they could sell the XT for much less to begin with, and if that is the case they are being complete knuckleheads not to b/c it would gain them even more marketshare.