What's The Difference Between The 9800 SE and 9800 Pro?

Actually, the only difference between the 256-bits variant of the Radeon 9800 SE and its big brother, the Radeon 9800 Pro is the number of pixel pipelines. The 256-bits Radeon 9800 SE is exactly the same as the Radeon 9800 Pro, except for four disabled pixel pipelines.

Both cards even have the same clock speeds of 380 MHz core and 340MHz memory! All these facts makes the Radeon 9800 SE very attractive to modders.

Below is a short comparison of the Radeon 9800 variants.

You can find a more detailed comparison in our Desktop Graphics Card Comparison Guide.

What Is Soft-Modding?

This guide will teach you how to mod the Radeon 9800 SE via soft-modding. Soft modding means modifying the function or features of a hardware component through software means. This means you won't actually need to physically modify anything in your Radeon 9800 SE card.

This is good because there is little or no risk of voiding your warranty. Of course, you will need to change the Radeon 9800 SE's stock cooler. And officially, that will void your card's warranty. But that is a small problem for one can always swap the stock cooler back and no one will be the wiser!

There are actually two ways of soft-modding the Radeon 9800 SE. The first way is to soft-mod the card using patched drivers. OCFaq has developed a patch that modifies ATI's Catalyst drivers.

The second method is to soft-mod the card using an Omega driver. Omega drivers are ATI Catalyst drivers that have been modified and tweaked for better performance and visual quality.

After showing you how to soft-mod the Radeon 9800SE, I will compare the performance of both patch methods with the unmodded ATI Catalyst 4.4 driver. This will show you the performance gains you can expect from both patch methods.