VOGONS


First post, by appiah4

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Here's a strange thing I wanted to share.. I've found and bought a score of new old score Radeon 9800s from a local seller, and have been slowly selling them off on various places. The cards all work fine and are indeed Radeon 9800s. They looked strange and unfamliar to me for being 9800s when I bought them but I didn't give this much thought.

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Now, after selling half a score of them I came across one in a box missing its cooler, so I thought I'd clean it up, assemble a new cooler on it and keep it as mine. As soon as I cleaned the GPU I saw this:

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The R360 is the Radeon 9800XT GPU, not Radeon 9800 (or even the PRO for that matter.) Now, the funniness does not end here; I made sure I was not crazy, and this card is indeed built using the Radeon 9700OPRO PCB (PN 109-94200-30).

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This makes partial sense, as the 9800 clockspeeds are indeed the same as the 9700PRO, and I know that 9800SE cards were made using R350 GPUs on R9700PRO PCBs, but I had never ever before seen a 9800 card use either an R360 GPU or a 9700PRO PCB.

I doublechecked to make sure it wasn't a 9700PRO with a 9800 BIOS flashed on it, and no it is not that. It is even labeled properly as a 9800 on the back of the card as well as the box itself.

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I found this all curious and thought I would share. Anyone saw anything like this before?

I really have the urge to flash this card to a Radeon 9800PRO now, as 9800SEs built with this PCB were easily softmodded to 9800PROs, and the RAM on it (Samsung K4D263238E-GC2A) is rated up to 350MHz anyway. I feel it could even be flashed to a 9800XT.

Retronautics: A digital gallery of my retro computers, hardware and projects.

Reply 1 of 3, by Imperious

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It's a known fact that a lot of 9800 pro's used R350 GPU's, but some also used the R360.
I have a bunch of the Medion 9800xxl cards, they are 128mb but all have R360 (9800XT) GPU's.

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Reply 2 of 3, by appiah4

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I know that late PROs had R360s but regular 9800s did not; neither did they come on 9700PRO PCBs AFAIK.

Retronautics: A digital gallery of my retro computers, hardware and projects.