Ouch! That’s One Hot Heat Sink!

Before you even attempt the soft-mod, you must change the cooler of your Radeon 9800 SE card!

The stock cooler of this guide's reference card (Powercolor Radeon 9800 SE) is based on the Radeon 9700 Pro cooler. But because the R350 has more transistors than the R300 VPU used in the Radeon 9700 Pro, this card gets real hot!

At stock clock speeds, the cooler just barely manages to handle the Radeon 9800SE's thermal output. It is actually too hot to touch the heat sink when the VPU is under heavy load! Imagine how much hotter it will get if the 4 disabled pipelines are enabled.

So, the first thing I did when I got this card was to replace the stock cooler with the Zalman ZM-80C heat sink and the optional ZP-01 fan. But being the extreme modder and overclocker I am, I replaced the ZP-01 with a Sunon 80mm fan I had lying around.

To further improve its performance, I screwed an AMD stock cooler's fan onto the front heat sink. Haha! I love my ideas.

You should change the cooler before attempting this soft-mod. If you cannot afford an aftermarket GPU cooler kit like the Zalman ZM-80C, you can try modding your own GPU cooler.

Final Checklist

Alright, everyone! Here is a final checklist of what you will need for this project :-

• One Radeon 9800 SE 256-bits with an aftermarket or modded cooler.
• One computer with at least a 300W PSU
• OCFaq-patched driver or an Omega driver
• ATI Tool utility
• 3DMark03 benchmark utility

Got everything? Then let's mod this baby!