Finally got the cards this week:

I also got a Radeon 9700 TX, but that one is faulty, unfortunately 🙁. By the looks of it, it seems to be a GPU related problem.
FireGLs are working great though 😀. Fans on the coolers are fairly silent, I think they don't have many hours on them. And cards look very clean.

Some results that can be expected:

I have used firegl-unified-8.103.2.1.1 driver (April 2005) that was recommended for gaming on rage3d forum some time ago. Tested briefly with UT2003 and FarCry. I still need to do some OpenGL tests (Doom3) to confirm everything works properly.

Will do some more driver tests when I get some time. Some ideas:
* lastest FireGL driver
* latest Omega driver
* lates soft-modded Catalyst driver (8.10)

First impressions are great. Get them while you still can. They go for as low as 15 € on eBay auctions 😉.
I wish I have bought more from same sellers.

I believe I used the standard ATI 9700 pro drivers with my FireGL X1 by just 1st installing those drivers with one of my 9700 cards then just swapping over to my FireGL card. Its been about a year since I did it and I know I have a copy of the FireGL drivers as well but I seem to remember I got my cards working with the non FireGL drivers as well.

Direct 3D Catalyst driver will work for sure. OpenGL is problematic with FireGL. Omega bundles D3D with FireGL openGL driver, if I remember correctly.

New coolers for FireGL X1 and Radeon 9700 TX:

9700 TX appears to be a "golden sample" chip:

Artefacts start appearing north of 410Mhz, in most cases with R300 limit is ~380Mhz.

Regarding infamous "yellow goop" TIM originally used on those cards, it depends how much the card was used. In one case it was totally elastic and went 100% off with just some pre-heating and IPA. In most cases it's solid and takes hour or two to get it off using heat, WD-40, nitro thinner, scraping with razor blade ... etc.

I've been playing with drivers for FireGL X1 lately, basically to see what works best.

Short summary:
1. modded Catalyst 4.12 (patched with RivaTuner scripts) works the best. Both D3D and OpenGL work. Stability / performance is great.
2. firegl-unified-8.103.2.1.1 - made for the card, no driver tampering needed. OpenGL performance noticeably worse than Cat 4.12.
3. last Omega release - D3D works, OpenGL does not.

RivaTuner scripts work with no warnings up to Catalyst 8.4 but OpenGL component does not work past 4.12 ... not sure why.

So for mine I knocked a resistor off the back and flashed the bios to 9700 Pro. Sadly I got rid of a bunch of stuff when I had to move and that was one of the cards I got rid of but after doing that it always just behaved like a 9700 pro

Deleted post.
Thus thread is for FireGL drivers
Closed