Mobility Radeon 9600

[Duke of Rezin]

I saw this in a post at NotebookForums. If you have this chip in your notebook (it may work with other ATI Mobility chips, I don't know), download the latest Catalyst driver from ATI, save it in C:\ATI\Support and execute it. It will start to go through the installation process but stop, saying that your chip is not supported and that it can't install. Then go to Start\Control Panel\System\Device Manager\Hardware\Display Adapters and open the box for the 9600. Choose driver, update driver, no not at this time, install this driver from a specific location, and then Don't Search, I Will Choose Which Driver To Install, take your pick and reboot. I'm running my Mobility 9600 as a 9800 XT. Windows completely sees it as a 9800XT and I can even now play all the 9700/9800 ATI demos, and they play quite smoothly. No, this does not increase the clock speed (this chip is rather overclockable though) but the chip will now process all the shaders and whatnot as a 9800XT.

[Damned Angel]

cool. Did it give any preformance increase or just let you run the demos?

[TechZ]

I'm guessing all this does is fool the apps to make them think you have a better card that what you really have? :)

Interesting though. Thanks. I'd do it, except my laptops got a 9200 :(

A real mod is converting your 9800 Pro to an XT via a BIOS update, which really works ;)

[Duke of Rezin]

OK, I reinstalled 3DMark 2005 andset up everything else the same I last ran this benchmark and saw a 48fps increase. Nothing to get too excited about. The only other graphically intensive program I have installed right now is UT2004 and I don't see any real noticeable difference as it ran that game rather fluidly before, and I've never run that benchmark on this box before.

Quote: I'm guessing all this does is fool the apps to make them think you have a better card that what you really have?

That may well be the case but it may be possible too that the 9600 and 9800 are pretty much the same chip with the 9600 simply being lower quality production runs or both, I really could not say. One thing, though. I now have to boot several times while on battery before it boots up for good. I had installed (and have now uninstalled) the latest ACE Mega Codec Pack the same morning I did the video driver trick and the last time I had the pack installed, for some reason it really played havoc with my laptop so I'm not sure to which action this new booting problem is related.

[TechZ]

http://www.rojakpot.com/default.aspx?location=3&var1=98&var2=0

Differences between the Ati Mobile GPU Range.

[Duke of Rezin]

That answers that question.