Radeon 9200 PCI 128meg for the PC... can this card be flashed to work?

I read on mac rumors once that ati had started using different rom sizes in mac and pc versions to stop the flashing. they charge more for the mac rom versions because its a lot of extra work and a vary small market compared to the x86 world. the newer radeon 7000 cards don't work when flashed so could be the same for the 9200.

I believe it can be flashed, but the flash chip has to be changed to one of a larger size.

but I await news of successful flashes! The hot ticket so far seems to be the 9100 PCI (using a modded 8500 ROM), but while they're fast they're also scarce.

As for the ROM chip itself, it's trivial to swap in a larger one, as long as the replacement is the same chip type. Heck you may not even have to swap chips! The 9100 I flashed has a chip labeled 1/2 kb but it's actually the 1kb part marked "wrong".

dan k

9100's are faster then 9200's anyways. The 9200 is clocked down. Not that it matters much since the PCI bus is the limiting factor.

ati does this and gives the slower one a faster sounding name.. I hate that! the original radeon pci trumps the radeon 7000 in 3D and even a little in 2D but the name "Radeon 7000" sounds faster than just plain "Radeon". Radeon 9200 for sure sounds faster/better than 9100. ya know what i'm saying?

The speed difference is very small because of the limits of the PCI bus. Basically as newer products come out, what used to be top of the line, becomes low end. The 9000/9100/9200 is basically an 8500 with a few small changes. The original radeon was later renamed to the radeon 7200. The 7000 was originally called the Radeon VE before numbers came around. They switched to numbers as they are easier to move up as a product line then letters.

I've been testing cards for awhile now and I've been surprised at the speed of the latest PCI cards I've got. Using Q3A I'm seeing significantly faster frame rates with the latest cards.

On a PC especially Q3A does huge frame rates on a PCI card. I don't have my notes in front of me as I write this, but ISTR the 9100 doing something like 80fps at 1152x (@max settings) on my 1.5gHz P4. Clearly a PCI card can perform pretty damn good with the right drivers and processor.

Again, I don't have my notes, but on my Macs the (now) flashed 9100 was blowing the doors off such cards as Rage 128 and Radeon 7K, and is comfortably faster than the 7500 (Radeon Mac Edition.)

I suspect the limits aren't the PCI bus itself, but other stuff like the drivers and processor speed that limit Mac PCI video card performance.

dan k

I read somewhere that a guy with a B&W G3 with a G4 500 upgraded that was overclocked to 650 and had a radeon 9200 in the 66mhz slot was able to run halo at a playable level. think they said 26-32 fps which is quite playable. I was amazed by this as I think halo requirements are an 800mhz cpu.

I read somewhere that a guy with a B&W G3 with a G4 500 upgraded that was overclocked to 650 and had a radeon 9200 in the 66mhz slot was able to run halo at a playable level. think they said 26-32 fps which is quite playable. I was amazed by this as I think halo requirements are an 800mhz cpu.

The only way it would anywhere clos to playable is with every option at zero, where it looks like utter crap. And I still dont think it got 30fps, Unless he had the timedemo score to show it. I know a guy with a 600Mhz G4 and a radeon 8500AGP and the game stills craws in many areas for him. No way a PCI is going to out perform an AGP.

I have halo, and I get a few slowdowns in certain areas on a 1.3GHz G4 with a radeon 9800 pro.

Any limits to which 9100's can be flashed? I flashed a few PC 64MB 7000's to work on the Mac but I know there were particulars (DDR RAM, RAM speed, certain 3rd party-branded cards that worked) to keep in mind when buying a 7000 even before the ROM size change.

I just did a quick search and came up with several different 9100's...and a 128MB 9100se??? Some of the time "new" models are "created" by vendors with incorrect ads so that may or may not be an actual card.

I see flashed 9100's being sold on Ebay as "Mac compatible" 9100's. I think its a bit shady to describe these like they're original ATI products. If I was just looking for a card for my Mac and didn't know all the options out there I'd assume I just found a deal on a used ATI card. But I bring this up because I remember seeing this same crap once the 7000 flashing passed beyong being common knowledge and Flashed 7000's started showing up everywhere. I can't remember why, but most of the people who didn't like to SAY flashed in their ads were using cards I would have avoided.

To give whoever this is some credit, at least they point out their 9100's won't run two monitors as a spanned desktop. The whole point of selling the flashed 7000s as Mac compatible wasn't to explain that they'd work in your Mac, but to avoid letting you know they'd have sleep problems (was that ever fixed?).

Anyway, I won't shell out $90 to have somebody flash a card for me and I won't automaticly assume the card they're using is the one I want.

Tom

Here's the card I bought (@ US$49), now out-of-stock:
http://store.yahoo.com/shentech/vixt91ra91pr.html (64MB)

Visiontek Xtasy Radeon 9100 Pro 64MB DDR PCI Video Card - OEM w/DVI

part number on the label = VTK-165276

Here's what they have in stock now (@ US$69):
http://store.yahoo.com/shentech/vixt91ra91pr1.html

They look the same, but who knows if they are any different.

So does anyone have any news of 9200 PCI flashing success?

hth,

dan k