ATI Radeon 9800SE Pipes

I am researching some different cards in the under $150 range and came across this ATI Radeon 9800SE from Powercolor at $144. Clock rates are 380/680 stock and its 128mb of 256bit ram. My question is this...I was reading through some comments on the card and many of them mentioned things like "All 8 pipes unlocked and no artifacts, running great" or "I was only able to get 4 pipes unlocked, had artifacts with anything more even with liquid cooling" ...Now what exactly does this "unlocking all 8 pipes" mean? One mentioned unlocking all 8 by "softmodding" with omega drivers from www.omegadrivers.net, and another that if you unlock all 8 it performs similar to a 9800pro with bonus being only a 9800se price. Im still relatively new to building computers, and do well but some of the technical jargon is sometimes confusing heh. So to sum up ... 1) What does unlocking all 8 pipelines mean. 2) What is softmodding? (what it seems like is a way to get more performance out of card without physically altering it which is I think hardmod?) and 3) What exactly are artifacts? performance glitches?... Thanks in advance for reply.

 

ati makes one card design and then criples it by disabling features to sell at a lower price point for those who can't afford a 300$ card.
artifacts are what looks like image tearing and snow all over the picture. it will look like you are getting bad reception.
soft moding is where you use aftermarket drivers or flash the video bios.

 

Ahh, thank you silenze. That was what I needed to know. Those sneaky folks over at ATI. At least it lets a softmod potentially unlock a cards real potential though right? Thanks for the reply

 

What these people are talking about are pixel pipelines. I can't really tell you what they do; I guess they're ... uh ... pipelines for pixels.

Anyway, just to be pedantic:
ATi don't always do this crippling stunt. This trend started with the original Radeon 9500. The Pro version had 8 pipelines, while the non-Pro had 4. ATi chose to produce the cards on the same PCB (Printed Circuit Board), artificially disabling 4 pipelines on the non-Pro version.
Of course, this opened up the possibility of modding the card to enable the extra pipelines, and some lucky users who got a good card could turn their card into a high-performance power horse with no extra charge.
Unfortunately, ATi soon wisened up to this trick and started printing the 9500 non-Pro on a separate PCB. The 9600 and 9700 series are also not moddable at all.

What you need to know is this:
First of all, there's no constant card configuration which will guarantee you will be able to mod it. In some cases there is a prefered configuration, but even that is no guarantee.
Worse, the mod will not always succeed even with an appropriate card. There's a theory that ATi takes slightly defected cards (i.e.: mainly ones where there is a defect in some of the extra 4 pipelines), and cripples them so they act as lower-performance cards. What this means is that when you try to enable the extra pipelines, you will start having problems with your display.

In short, this mod is a great bonus, but you usually shouldn't count on it when choosing your card.

Oh, yeah:
The softmod is a way to mod your card via software. There are specific drivers you can install which will enable the 4 extra pixel pipelines.
The hardmod is a way to do the same via hardware. Once you did the softmod and made sure your card works OK, you can hardmod the card so it acts like its higher-end counterpart without the need for special drivers.

For more info on this issue, try: http://www.techpowerup.com/softmod/.

 

thanks AirBot, that was some great info there. Explained a lot!

 

My pleasure.