Personal Bytes

ATi’s X800GTO is one the best buys available on the graphic cards market. It combines price along with quality for as much as 200€. The great thing about this graphic card is that uses the X800Pro chipset which has already proved to be worth every penny. The only difference between this model and the real X800Pro is that 4 pipelines are disabled, summing up a total of 12 pipelines available (of 16 possible). Memory/GPU clocks are also set to slower speeds.

Now that I’ve got your attention, imagine if you could activate the 4 pipelines and overclock the core/memory frequency. You would get a X800XT. But if you’re fortunate enough to have a Connect3D or a Sapphire GTO2, then you’ll be able to reach the performance of the X850XT.

I think there’s no need to get in much detail about how to mod the card. It’s pretty straightforward:

1. Verify if your card is moddable;
2. Download the modified BIOS version;
3. Boot from a DOS/FreeDOS environment and run the flash utility to replace the BIOS firmware.

If you find it confusing though, I’ll point you out exacly what I did. You can check further details on the links at the end of the page (really good tutorials on the subject).

1. Downloaded ATiTool (only available for Windows) in order to check if my card was moddable; It was, so I carried on.
2. Downloaded a FreeDOS bootable iso image in order to be able to flash my BIOS. I didn’t have any floppy drive available nor usb pen, so I had to do this way;
3. From the FreeDOS operating system, I did flashrom -p -f 0 CONNEC~1.BIN. The flash went fine. Rebooted
4. Checked again ATiTool and guess what, the 16 pipelines were activated ;-)

For those who still wish to overclock, then I’ve read some reports stating that they achieved 540/590 (Core/Mems). Defaults are 390/400. I have mine running steady at 522/569 without any crash or visual artifacts. Nevertheless, ATiTools will help you setting the speeds. Remember though that the results you may achieve vary greatly depending on the memories used, date/local of assembly, etc..

References

• TechPowerUp
• VR-Zone