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Sapphire RADEON X800 GTO² Layout

At first glance, the Sapphire RADEON X800 GTO² looks like any other garden variety RADEON X800 graphics card, the GDDR3 memory components are clamshelling the PCB on the front and back and are, as not otherwise expected, covered by heatspreaders. Since the test sample uses a PCIe interface, it is not surprising to see the 6-pin connector for external power at the back end of the PCB. The front bracket boasts a standard VGA output along with an s-video jack and a DVI port.

             

(click for larger images)

Scrubbing

One thing that is necessary before any operation is to make sure that what we are looking at is really what we think it is. This same principle applies for any modification of hardware just as well, in other words, never trust what anybody else says if there is an easy way to verify the true identity of the sample. In this case, we went with the procedure outlined in this article on TechPowerUp using ATITool 0.24.

      

Before and After:
As expected, fresh out of the box, the GTO² shows the 12 active pipelines and the core and memory frequencies of 400 and 490 MMz, respectively. Note that the two values in the die and substrate fuses pointed out by the red arrows read "F" - a prerequisite for modding to 16 pipeline functionality.

The Procedure

In any stable system, there should be no problem flashing the GTO² to 16 pipelines. Unlike in the case of the older X800 Pro series, where success was more or less a matter of luck, there are no blown bridges either that need to be reconnected. In other words, the only tools needed are the FLASHROM utility along with the appropriate Sapphire.X800GTO2_16P.Samsung16.BIN BIOS file and a bootable DOS floppy. As always, it is advisable to hold down the Ctrl + F5 keys during the boot process to force a strip boot and bypassing all Windows startup files. Since DOS does not support more than 8 character file names, one either needs to rename the BIOS file accordingly or else use the "~" key as extension as shown below. To make the reproduction of the procedure as easy as possible, we have a screenshot of the actual syntax used - including the /p/ switch to force-flash the BIOS.

The actual string entered to initiate the flash procedure is in the red box

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