Modify the Radeon 9500 to be a Radeon 9700

IXBT REPORTS, based on overclockers.ru, that it's possible to perform modifications to the Radeon 9500 to turn it into a Radeon 9700.

There's Russian text and some diagrams about this claim, here.

If your Russian is a tad rusty, there's a part translation from iXBT over at VR-Zone.

We can't vouch for whether this all works or not, and it looks like you might have to be a tad nifty with the old soldering iron.

One reader ponders whether such a conversion, anyway, would do much more than enable the other four pipelines, but the 9500 only has half the memory bandwidth of the 9700 Pro.

And there's a full translation of the lot, at Digit-Life. This mod looks tricky... try it at your own peril, we'd suggest... µ

* INQBLOT Lead solder is due to be banned in the European Union by 2006.