Reserator with X800PRO Vivo@XT PE & XP-M2500+/A64?

akaidiot · Post by **akaidiot** » Thu Sep 02, 2004 8:11 am

I have this computer right now:

2400+XP-M@2005MHz 1.47V
NF7-S 2.0
2x512MB Mushkin PC3500lvl2@422/2-2-2-11
2x suspended 120GB 7200.7@RAID0

And I have a X800PRO Vivo on the way which I will mod to XTPE speed. And I'm planning on buying a Reserator with the GPU block. Will it be able to handle it? With some moderate oc? One more thing which is a plus to reserator over other watercooling systems is that it handles A64 and socket 939 which I plan to upgrade to soon.

According to the Power Consumption of Contemporary Graphics Accelerators. Part II: NVIDIA vs. ATI The X800XT produces 63.23W under load and according CPU Power by Kostik software the Barton CPU's produce 59,2W (As I have understood, the XP-M is regular bartons but which can be run at very low volts?)

Well the total amout of power produced by this setup and to be cooled by the reserator is 122,3W.

Could people with the reserator check their power consumption and give temps under load(3dmark & prime95 run at same time porhaps? Or just game play?) so we have something to compare to. I am sure I'm not the only one wondering about this!

Post by **Rusty075** » Thu Sep 02, 2004 9:25 am

The total wattage used in the Reserator review is pretty close to the total you're looking at. (jump to the test results on page 5)

Considering that you are never likely to run your system at those loads long enough to ever reach the temps in the review, I'd say you're perfectly safe.

akaidiot · Post by **akaidiot** » Thu Sep 02, 2004 10:06 am

Rusty075 wrote:The total wattage used in the Reserator review is pretty close to the total you're looking at. (jump to the test results on page 5)

Considering that you are never likely to run your system at those loads long enough to ever reach the temps in the review, I'd say you're perfectly safe.

Yup I read that. Anybody got a number on how much the 9500PRO video card produces?

Lapinou · Post by **Lapinou** » Thu Sep 02, 2004 10:18 am

I'm running an AMD 3800+ with a OC'ed X800Pro (modded to 16 pipes & 560 Mhz) both cooled with a reserator (and the Zalman GPU watercooler).. I've not had any problems with 6 hour Doom 3 sessions. It tends to max out at 48 degrees (CPU temp) which is ok (30 degrees ambient temp).

This is similar to your setup so you should be ok.

akaidiot · Post by **akaidiot** » Thu Sep 02, 2004 12:49 pm

That's great news!

My reserator is on the way!

Straker · Post by **Straker** » Thu Sep 02, 2004 11:44 pm

Lapinou wrote:I'm running an AMD 3800+ with a OC'ed X800Pro (modded to 16 pipes & 560 Mhz) both cooled with a reserator (and the Zalman GPU watercooler).. I've not had any problems with 6 hour Doom 3 sessions. It tends to max out at 48 degrees (CPU temp) which is ok (30 degrees ambient temp).

This is similar to your setup so you should be ok.

30c in your room and you're cooling an a64 3800 and an x800 pro and your cpu's only 48c under load? that is phenomenal for a reserator (not to mention zalman blocks), never would have guessed... neat.

don't go and ruin it by saying you're using an Asus mb or something.

toiletduckuk · Post by **toiletduckuk** » Fri Sep 03, 2004 5:05 am

And I have a X800PRO Vivo on the way which I will mod to XTPE speed

Mind explaining how to do this? I was looking at buying an XT... seems a bit poinless if I can mod a pro!

Cheers

Dave

akaidiot · Post by **akaidiot** » Fri Sep 03, 2004 6:06 am

toiletduckuk wrote:
And I have a X800PRO Vivo on the way which I will mod to XTPE speed
Mind explaining how to do this? I was looking at buying an XT... seems a bit poinless if I can mod a pro!

Cheers

Dave

Exactly, why pay more? Check out his Guide it is suppose to be really easy. If you have a vivo card, with 1.6ns rams and the yellow connector for a rage theather chip you should be homefree! Slim to non failure rate! If so you can flash back to x800 vivo, most times..

toiletduckuk · Post by **toiletduckuk** » Fri Sep 03, 2004 7:09 am

well, just ordered one heh. good luck to us both i guess

madpoet · Post by **madpoet** » Fri Sep 03, 2004 9:34 am

Have a good suggestion for which model X800 Pro to try this on? Where'd you get it from?

toiletduckuk · Post by **toiletduckuk** » Fri Sep 03, 2004 11:29 am

well, I just ordered a Powercolor VIVO card (from http://www.aria.co.uk) - we'll see on monday\tuesday if it does the job!

Straker · Post by **Straker** » Fri Sep 03, 2004 2:12 pm

no "model" per se, just use an x800 pro vivo, NOT a regular pro. i think Sapphire and Gigabyte have generally given the best results, needless to say ATI's VIVO cards have the same laser cut as the regular Pros so the mod won't work. what's happened is that regular Pros don't have Rage Theater (needed for vivo basically), XT PEs do, a lot of the 1.6ns RAM is apparently flaky, and so failed XT PEs were resold as Pro VIVOs. Some Sapphire cards even have an XT sticker under the Pro sticker on the cooler.

ATI started cracking down on this hard well over a month ago though; not sure how likely current cards are to be modded successfully. Still worth a shot, but then again, if it doesn't work and they're still using failed XTs for this, it probably won't overclock anywhere near as well as a regular Pro.

akaidiot · Post by **akaidiot** » Fri Sep 03, 2004 2:49 pm

Straker wrote:needless to say ATI's VIVO cards have the same laser cut as the regular Pros so the mod won't work.

Huh? I've bought a ATI x800 pro vivo. Actually it's a plain pro but every card so far in the serial number series and that batch has had the rage theater chip and has been able to flash to XT PE

Anyhoo.. What do you mean "laser cut". Have you got a link or something explaining this? Did you mean plain ATI branded Pro vivos or all the vivos, pro&xt OR all pro vivos/all brands?

Or something else..?

Straker · Post by **Straker** » Fri Sep 03, 2004 5:15 pm

sorry, meant all X800 Pro VIVOs built by/branded as ATI, rather than simply "powered by ATI" like they call cards produced/sold by third parties. Was just saying that since ATI obviously doesn't want this happening, they're in the best position to do something about it, and I don't know of soft mods being very successful on cards built by ATI... not sure if they've disabled the extra pipelines in hardware on their VIVO Pros from the start or only after hearing about this, though.
The regular, non-VIVO Pros all have a small laser cut on the upper right part of the GPU die which is apparently responsible for disabling 4 of the pipelines. If you google x800 hardmod there're zillions of threads about getting around this, but the success rate is fairly low, and as far as I know noone is quite sure exactly how ATI determines which pipelines are defective (since the cut is in the same place on all cards; you'd think it'd be between different points out of those 4 if they were disabling defective/unreliable pipes, or if the process were reliable enough that it didn't matter, that all hardmods would be successful).
also a decent pic at http://www.andovernaturalproducts.co.uk/x800Pro1.jpg

Between those two solder points on the left of the box with the line through them, there's a little line cut into the PCB. You can scrape down into the PCB and reconnect those two points properly, or simply paint around them with a conductive paint/pen. The softmoddable VIVO Pros don't have this cut (I guess they just assemble full cards before testing/binning them), the GPU is just hobbled via BIOS.

I heard of one Sapphire VIVO card that actually had this cut despite being produced maybe 3 months ago, not sure what happened there. My current card was made sometime early/mid-July and it softmodded fine, as have almost all others up to and since that point. Definitely not saying it won't work now (on Sapphire cards at least), just that it's not literally guaranteed any more.

Bottom line is you still get what you pay for; some softmodded VIVOs can barely run at stock Pro speeds, and almost none will make it to stock XT PE speeds (or they would have just been sold as XT PEs). OTOH many regular Pros can get to around 540/550MHz gpu/ram respectively, with stock cooling. Mine runs up to about 515-520MHz on both gpu/ram, at which point I get maybe 600 more 3dmarks than with my oced regular Pro. Considering the extra pipelines are mainly responsible for raw fill rate and simple texturing and such I'm almost wondering if one would usually be better off with a Pro that ocs particularly well. For me it was worth it to just pay the extra $5 for VIVO either way, since I'm still using a p4 2.4 and I'm so CPU limited in any recent game it's not even funny.

edit: just for clarity: as far as i know, all regular X800 Pros sold by any company have this cut, i *believe* most/all X800 Pro VIVOs made and sold by ATI do have this cut, and up until very recently, almost all X800 Pro VIVOs made and sold by any company other than ATI do not have this cut and can simply be modded with a BIOS flash. Again, with current Sapphire/Gigabyte/PowerColor etc VIVOs it's not that they won't work, just that ATI is well aware of this and has apparently been pressuring third party companies and they've gradually started disabling cards the same way ATI does. I have mine now so I stopped following threads on other forums.

if you google x800 vivo soft mod or so, there are tons of threads/reports on other forums on success rates and such.

akaidiot · Post by **akaidiot** » Fri Sep 03, 2004 5:38 pm

Ok, I've checked several swedish forums and over here there is almost 100% success rate. Check this database.. Almost all clock up to XT PE speeds..?!

Also, the card which I have in the mail over to me is from the 630430* serial series which has had 100% success rate, where I've checked(we'll see in a couple of days..)

As I understand all the vivos doesn't (for some reason) have the hard-cut, just flashed to 12-pipes..? Porhaps that is about to change, but up until now(and for some time I believe..) it's just a XT-PE in PRO clothes..

Straker · Post by **Straker** » Sat Sep 04, 2004 3:14 am

akaidiot wrote:Check this database.. Almost all clock up to XT PE speeds..?!

those are some interesting temps, would bet money almost all those cards far under 75-80C are either WCed or have floor fans pointing at them, unless they're recent enough to be using one of the new Silencers.

but yeah, if you can cool the card off some you should be able to get some more out of it - that's the nature of the binning process, ATI (or Sapphire, or Intel for that matter) has to go by the lowest common denominator, can't sell hardware that won't work under all reasonable circumstances as far as cooling goes. i've seen reports from maybe a half dozen people that had problems running at stock Pro speeds (or at least literally could not oc at all) after the soft mod, and one or two that actually needed to underclock a bit.

As I understand all the vivos doesn't (for some reason) have the hard-cut, just flashed to 12-pipes..? Porhaps that is about to change, but up until now(and for some time I believe..) it's just a XT-PE in PRO clothes..

well, not quite (otherwise there wouldn't be such huge problems actually getting XT PEs onto shelves), but more or less yeah, and barely even the clothes in some cases.

FWIW i've never heard of the softmod actually not working (leaving the card unusable) due to the disabled four pipes truly being defective - not sure if this is partly responsible for softmodded cards not OCing as well as regular Pros or what, but i guess this is a good thing since there doesn't seem to be a way to re-disable them afterwards.
i think it's a bit more complicated than an XT with a Pro bios on it, 'cause you can't just replace the Sapphire VIVO bios with a Sapphire XT PE one for example, but i have no idea why... no big deal anyways

edit: was just looking around to see if there were many failures yet, doesn't look like it... " dont know if this has been posted yet or not. But I recently bought a gigabyte x800pro vivo, and it came with the 16 pipes unlocked straight outa the box. Has anyone else had this?" for starters, from just a few weeks ago, hilarious.
also found a reason for the gigabyte tool + bios thing, http://www.techpowerup.com/articles/ove ... idcard/100

toiletduckuk · Post by **toiletduckuk** » Sat Sep 04, 2004 12:25 pm

lot of the 1.6ns RAM is apparently flaky, and so failed XT PEs were resold as Pro VIVOs

This is definately an untrue rumour. If you successfully unlock the 4 pipes, the problem you may face is the card cannot run the XTPE clock speeds due to only getting a certain voltage (enough for the pro). To solve it, a simple voltmod allows full speeds.

akaidiot · Post by **akaidiot** » Sat Sep 04, 2004 1:01 pm

Straker wrote:
akaidiot wrote:Check this database.. Almost all clock up to XT PE speeds..?!
those are some interesting temps, would bet money almost all those cards far under 75-80C are either WCed or have floor fans pointing at them, unless they're recent enough to be using one of the new Silencers. but yeah, if you can cool the card off some you should be able to get some more out of it - that's the nature of the binning process, ATI (or Sapphire, or Intel for that matter) has to go by the lowest common denominator, can't sell hardware that won't work under all reasonable circumstances as far as cooling goes. i've seen reports from maybe a half dozen people that had problems running at stock Pro speeds (or at least literally could not oc at all) after the soft mod, and one or two that actually needed to underclock a bit.

As I understand all the vivos doesn't (for some reason) have the hard-cut, just flashed to 12-pipes..? Porhaps that is about to change, but up until now(and for some time I believe..) it's just a XT-PE in PRO clothes..
well, not quite (otherwise there wouldn't be such huge problems actually getting XT PEs onto shelves), but more or less yeah, and barely even the clothes in some cases.
FWIW i've never heard of the softmod actually not working (leaving the card unusable) due to the disabled four pipes truly being defective - not sure if this is partly responsible for softmodded cards not OCing as well as regular Pros or what, but i guess this is a good thing since there doesn't seem to be a way to re-disable them afterwards.
i think it's a bit more complicated than an XT with a Pro bios on it, 'cause you can't just replace the Sapphire VIVO bios with a Sapphire XT PE one for example, but i have no idea why... no big deal anyways

edit: was just looking around to see if there were many failures yet, doesn't look like it... " dont know if this has been posted yet or not. But I recently bought a gigabyte x800pro vivo, and it came with the 16 pipes unlocked straight outa the box. Has anyone else had this?" for starters, from just a few weeks ago, hilarious.
also found a reason for the gigabyte tool + bios thing, http://www.techpowerup.com/articles/ove ... idcard/100

If you check the database again and check the "kylning" column(kylning=cooler.. Well kinda..), you will see that almost all use original and far from every, I'd say tops 3-4 even own a floor fan here in chilly ol' Sweden..

About the XTPE in PRO clothes I defenetely believe so. If you check 3dmark results you see that flashed vivos in the same speed as a original out-of-the-box XT PE give teh same results! So I defenetely don't understand why ATI doesn't start shipping out XT PE's in box so cowards also can enjoy the XTPE power!

Straker · Post by **Straker** » Sat Sep 04, 2004 2:11 pm

akaidiot wrote:If you check the database again and check the "kylning" column(kylning=cooler.. Well kinda..), you will see that almost all use original

oh well, that would do it, sorry, didn't know the translation.

that's really weird, do they have their PCs sitting outside or something? normal temps for an x800 pro under load are 70-75C, before soft mod/vmod/oc... hmm

toiletduckuk wrote:This is definately an untrue rumour. If you successfully unlock the 4 pipes, the problem you may face is the card cannot run the XTPE clock speeds due to only getting a certain voltage (enough for the pro). To solve it, a simple voltmod allows full speeds.

that's why i said "apparently", it's not a "rumour", that's what ATI had been saying... whether that's the actual reason the availability of proper XT PEs is so horrible right now is anyone's guess. and no, of course it won't affect whether you're able to soft mod or not, but considering the success of the mod, the problem doesn't lie with the GPU yields, so where else would it be?

and yeah, i believe stock Pro vGPU is 0.1V lower than stock XT PE, but in either case, vmem is a separate mod.

edit:

akaidiot wrote:About the XTPE in PRO clothes I defenetely believe so. If you check 3dmark results you see that flashed vivos in the same speed as a original out-of-the-box XT PE give teh same results!

of course i would agree with this, assuming the modded card is able to perform at the same gpu/mem speeds as a regular XT PE - i was just saying that there's going to be a reason it wasn't sold as an XT PE, but for all i know they're tested at 35C ambient.

in either case you could still expect a "real" XT PE to have a little more headroom than these, that's all.
it's possible that a very few early VIVO cards completely met XT PE specs and were just relabeled to get them out the door before the XT was actually released... kinda doubt this is ever the case now though, since the demand for XT PEs is so high.

toiletduckuk · Post by **toiletduckuk** » Tue Sep 07, 2004 2:41 pm

worked for me

Straker · Post by **Straker** » Wed Sep 08, 2004 3:27 pm

congrats, what temps/speeds?
and when was it made (if there's an inspection sticker or factory date marking etc on it, i forget)? just curious

toiletduckuk · Post by **toiletduckuk** » Wed Sep 08, 2004 11:45 pm

well atitool keeps it at 60 with the fan barely spinning... going to watercool it for actual silence soon.

it's running stable at 520\560 - not too sure how to play about clocking yet so havent tried

Lapinou · Post by **Lapinou** » Fri Sep 10, 2004 6:37 am

Straker wrote:
Lapinou wrote:I'm running an AMD 3800+ with a OC'ed X800Pro (modded to 16 pipes & 560 Mhz) both cooled with a reserator (and the Zalman GPU watercooler).. I've not had any problems with 6 hour Doom 3 sessions. It tends to max out at 48 degrees (CPU temp) which is ok (30 degrees ambient temp).

This is similar to your setup so you should be ok.
30c in your room and you're cooling an a64 3800 and an x800 pro and your cpu's only 48c under load? that is phenomenal for a reserator (not to mention zalman blocks), never would have guessed... neat.

don't go and ruin it by saying you're using an Asus mb or something.

Yeah, it is an Asus MB. Hav'nt they fixed their CPU temp monitoring algorithm yet? I thought it would overestimate temp rather than underestimate it as with watercooling there is no airflow over the sensor.

That said, it is'nt silly, idle CPU temperatures (with cool 'n' quiet activated) are usually 36 degrees, unlike the old boards where there reported the CPU temperature managed to drop below ambient.

Sorry to spread false hope. Then again, I've been using it like this for months now and have had no problems (apart from the incident in the first week where the sonata PSU blew up and took the motherboard with it).

Straker · Post by **Straker** » Fri Sep 10, 2004 8:26 pm

yeah, that's way short of being too hot for the hardware or anything of course. i think most Asus mbs still underreport temps by 5-8C, good point on the no airflow thing though, have no idea. still sounds pretty good though, just not impossibly good.

RFMan · Post by **RFMan** » Mon Sep 13, 2004 8:20 pm

Straker wrote:sorry, meant all X800 Pro VIVOs built by/branded as ATI, rather than simply "powered by ATI" like they call cards produced/sold by third parties. Was just saying that since ATI obviously doesn't want this happening, they're in the best position to do something about it, and I don't know of soft mods being very successful on cards built by ATI...

Well, this is probably a very unceremonious first post on this board (I'll post something more official in the Gallery section in a minute), I want to confirm that "Built by ATI" cards do indeed mod very well to XTs.

I bought a retail boxed true-blue ATI Radeon X800Pro (not indicated VIVO on the box anywhere) from future shop in Canada. I unpack it and it turns out to have Rage Theater chip and the in/out connector. I was not aware of the mod when I bought it, but as soon as I was told of it, I tried and it works fine.

The cores shouldn't run hotter than a real XT, since it's reallt the same chip on both. The ram on the card needs RAM heatsinks and a bit of airflow to function properly though at the speed of an XT (560 MHz), so I figure there might be a little difference in RAM. But I've played long FarCry sessions without any problems at all.

My best friend bought his about 3 days after me (also a true ATI X800Pro bought at Future Shop), and it's also working fine. We're both seeing similar temps between his stock cooler and my Reserator setup (about 60C under heavy, prolonged load).

Anyways, check out the gallery section, I'll have system details in a few minutes!

Nice to meet you all!

Straker · Post by **Straker** » Tue Sep 14, 2004 1:00 am

hah. just mail order or what? my first x800 was a BBA regular pro from FS too. didn't even notice if it had the vivo connector on it, i was using my ancient matrox millennium ii for 3 months after my gf4 4400 died so i had the x800 running about 5 mins after it got here. ended up having to return it regardless, probably still would have anyways if i thought to check this but still interesting. doesn't really count though since obviously most of their x800 pros are just that and these weren't even labeled as vivos.

actually now that i think of it, i'm pretty sure my original card only had the 2ns ram, but i'm tired