Identifying The Moddable 256MB Radeon 9800 Pro

Because many people still get confused about how to identify a moddable 256MB Radeon 9800 Pro card, I will go into this topic with greater detail.

There are two different types of moddable 256MB Radeon 9800 Pro. One capable of being modded into a true Radeon 9800XT, while the other will only benefit from optimizations in the R360 core, without OVERDRIVE support.

Radeon 9800XT in disguised?

Below is a picture of a moddable 256MB Radeon 9800 Pro card which is virtually identical to the original 9800XT except for the cooler. I have taken the liberty of marking areas that will help you in identifying the correct 256MB Radeon 9800 Pro to get.

Note: ALL Radeon 9800 Pro 256MB cards which looks like the card above can be modded, regardless of brand (Built By ATI, Powercolor, Sapphire etc.)!

As you can see, there are five areas to check out before you can be sure you have the correct card.

GPU Cooler

The GPU cooler in the moddable card is different from earlier cards. It is now square in shape. Please note that it is square, not parallelogram-shaped.

The cooler also comes with a burnished aluminium shroud. Look out for the shape and the shroud.

Memory Chips

The memory chips must be arranged in the shape of the letter L. If the four memory chips are in a straight line (I-shaped), then you have a Radeon 9800 Pro with a 128-bit memory bus.

Also, the memory chips are usually 2.5ns Hynix memory chips although some cards may use Samsung memory chips. But the non-moddable cards generally use 2.2ns Samsung memory chips.