A Reminder About The Cores

Please remember that there are three kinds of R350 cores that make it into Radeon 9800 SE cards.

The first is the flawless, perfect R350. Cards with this core can be modded into a full Radeon 9800 Pro without any problems. If you get this card, you are one lucky dude!

The second type is the R350 core that is moddable but also produces some visual artifacts. This is because one or more of the disabled pipelines are partially damaged, causing them to produce those artifacts. The severity of this problem varies greatly from a few pixels displaying a different color to a completely unviewable screen due to a ‘checkerboard’ effect.

The third type is the completely unmoddable R350 core. In this case, one or more of the disabled pipelines have been damaged too much to allow proper operation at all. These cards will not run if the disabled pixel pipelines are enabled.

Note: Due to the R350's architecture, it is impossible to force the R350 to use only 5 or 6 or 7 pipelines. It can only run with either 4 or 8 pipelines enabled.

Warranty Issues

Although officially soft-modding is frowned upon, soft-modding your Radeon 9800 SE will not void your warranty. If the soft-mod does not work, all you need to do is revert the changes.

However, you will need to change the cooler and that will void your card's warranty. However, I sincerely recommend that you change the stock cooler to something better. Due to the high thermal output of the modded R350, a good GPU cooler is a must!

With all that said, be aware of the risks involved. All of us at Team ARP will not be responsible if you blow up your Radeon 9800 SE and set your house on fire!

The OCFaq Patch Or The Omega Driver?

Wondering which you should use?

Well, the OCFaq patch basically patches a file in official ATI Catalyst drivers. This patch will soft-mod the Radeon 9800 SE to enable all 8 pixel pipelines.

The Omega drivers are ATI Catalyst drivers that have been tweaked to optimize gaming performance. They will also allow you to soft-mod the Radeon 9800 SE to enable all 8 pixel pipelines.

In reality, both are very good and the difference, as far as soft-modding is concerned, is most likely negligible. I will show you which one performs better at the end of the guide. The scores will speak for themselves.