Anybody who reads the whirlpool forums has probably heard a thing or two about the unlocking of these very cheap cards. The card comes with 8 pipes and 4 shaders. However, with Riva Tuner and a bit of luck you can get this baby to really work for you.

I got all 16 pipes working on mine, and all 6 vertex shaders. The only thing holding it back is the RAM and low clock speeds. I have read about people volt modding though and acheiving some impressive results with over clocking.

The card comes with a big, awesome looking heatsink, but the fan is a bit loud for my liking (I've got an Anter Super Lanboy - I'm used to a pretty silent PC experience). The thing also idles at a core temperature of 60 degrees. I cranked up AoEIII and played it for an hour or so, and the temp maxed at 67 degrees. Does anybody know if this is normal, or is it a result of my handywork? Also, anybody know if using a different cooler will violate the warranty? And more importantly, does anybody even know of a VGA cooler (not water, want HSF setup) that's even worth the time/money/effort?

In conclusion, this is a great little card for the price (sporting a price tag similar to the 6600gt) and is great if you're looking to squeeze an extra year of life out of your AGP system.

Sounds like a decent card, but personally I'm gonna wait for the 7800gs agp prices to come down a bit before upgrading.

hrmmm tempting. i'm getting the s***s with crappy performance & s***ty gfx settings in elder scrolls:oblivion... especially in the outside areas... with my old fx5900 :[ but even playing it on a mates system with a beefy 6800ultra it's still quite low framage in outside areas... looks farkin lush though :D

i'll have to take my digicam over to my mates place on the weekend & take a snap of how oblivion looks using a panasonic projector with a native res of 1280*720 onto a 3meter screen... phhhaaaat! :D if we could get about another 15-20fps outside with hdr lighting, 4xaa & all the good shiz it'd be perfect! :D

Crizane Tribal: if you have oblivion... any chance of getting some outside fps readings using your cranked 6800xt? that would be most excellent.

Yeah I was in the same boat as you demon. I had an fx5900, and watching my friends with there gefore 6's and 7's made me sad. I was waiting for the 7800gs's to drop in price, but gave up.

I'd be more than happy to do some FPS readings on Oblivion... Noob question time: How do you enable the FPS display?

/me loves my BFG 7800 GS

so this unlocking, it gives performance roughly in line with a 6800GS or so?

Your card will run a little hotter than usual with the extra pipelines working away, but 67C is perfectly fine for a graphics card. They're happy up into 80+ degrees.

to show the fps in oblivion.. hit the tilde key for the console & type in 'tdt' without the 's

although after reading a couple of oblivion forums to find that command... it seems that even people with mega beeft systems are still not getting good framag in outside areas without disabling some of the gfx or fx. one dude had sli pci-e 7800's & was still only getting 18-22fps outside with all the shizzal turned on. :/

cheers :D

Yeah I've got a pretty decent rig with an XFX 7900GT and frames still drop sub-30 when outdoors. I'm expecting new nvidia drivers and oblivion non-beta patch to help though.

edit: ontopic - a decent aftermarket cooler is as so - http://www.pccasegear.com.au/prod2928.htm - just research and make sure it will fit your current card. Though if you RMA it with that cooler on, it will be void, make sure you put the old one on.

Sounds awesome. Grats on the full unlockage.

last edited by Seven at 14:47:01 09/May/06

this is a bit off topic, but i have a 7600GT + xp3200 and it runs cs:s pretty ordinarily in some parts. my old 9800 pro and xp2200 combo wasn't that much worse,

is this just drivers or has the game gotten more gfx intensive since christmas?

old games don't run much better on new hardware...unless I've just got the same problem as pave. :(

Also, anybody know if using a different cooler will violate the warranty?

Doesn't overclocking it at all void the warrenty?

HDR. Turn it off and you'll notice a large performance increase compared to your last setup. The 7x00 cards allow HDR where as your old one probably didn't. Not sure if HDR was in css back then anyway.

Doesn't overclocking it at all void the warrenty?

If the card stops functioning how are they gonna know it was overclocked?

HDR was added to some maps in CSS, primarily dust1 and 2

Thanks Seven. That cooler looks pretty sweet. I'll give it a shot.

Reload!: When you unlock quads/shaders/overclock it's usually just done through software like rivatuner, there is no physical change made to the card so if something does go wrong and you RMA it, unless they want to spend thousands on diagnosis/analysis, they can't tell. On a little side note to that, my dad worked for a major ice cream company, and every time somebody claimed the found a mouse/cockroach/somethign icky in their icecream, it cost the company $4000 each time to find out if the foreign object was introduced in the factory or by the customer. In all cases so far it was the customer :/

As per Demon's request:

http://img462.imageshack.us/img462/2839/oblivion20060510002232251ex.jpg
http://img431.imageshack.us/img431/4418/Oblivion2006-05-1000-17-10-48.jpg
http://img431.imageshack.us/img431/6813/Oblivion2006-05-1000-02-23-67.jpg
http://img431.imageshack.us/img431/938/Oblivion2006-05-0923-53-02-93.jpg

As you can see, it's ok most of the time. Things get a bit sticky though during cell loading and fights. I was fighting two wolves at sundown next to water and got down to like 10FPS. During most fights though it'll dip down to 13 every now and then, but mostly stick around 15 (which is ok since no pin-point FPS accuracy is needed).

cheers Crizane Tribal :D damn oblivion looks lush :D ... but it seems if i wanna have all the shiz & still get some nice fps that even the oc'd 6800xt might not be powerful enough! although i agree that you dont need a shooter games accuracy... it just s***s me & disturbs my absorbtion in the game when i see lag-jerkyness :P (although i also realise that i'll probably have to make a trade off somewhere.)

Check out the Oblivion tweak guide here: http://www.tweakguides.com/Oblivion_1.html

Should get you a good looking awesomely running Oblivions. Did for me.

hey Crizane Tribal where did you get the AGP version of this card? I have been looking around internet hardware dealers & they all only seem to have the PCI-E version!@#!@ :(

i used the above tweak guide (thx orbitor) & am getting almost decent frames in outside areas @ 800x600... but if i go upto 1024x768 they drop to around 8-10 :[
my plan then was to do the same as exemplar & wait for the 7800gs to come down in price ... but i'm getting impatient & now the 6800xt is looking good ;D

horsey :]
http://dem0n.qgl.org/images/temp/ScreenShot11.png