Flashing another ATI card?!?

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Level 2

260 points

Flashing another ATI card?!?

Has anybody ever tried to flash a ATI Radeon 9250 256MB PCI card? I'm curious if it's possible.

Powermac G3 MT/Sonnet G4-500Mhz-OC'ed 566Mhz 75 Bus Spd., Mac OS X (10.3.9), Radeon 7000/VE 64MB, 640 MB Ram, 80 GB WD, 9GB SCSI, LiteOn DVD R+RW, USB/FW

Posted on Jul 7, 2006 2:34 PM

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Answer 1

Allan Jones

Level 9

78,266 points

Jul 7, 2006 6:12 PM in response to Carl Gallo1

I've not heard of it being done. I have heard reports that the later ATI cards are so configured as to prevent flashing. There is one report on Accelerate Your Mac (search the page for "9250") about something else where the submitter has a flashed 9250 in his Mac, so maybe it's doable.

Have you googled "flashed 9250" yet? Might turn up some other sites with the info.

My concern is power. Big video cards are at the top of the food chain when it comes to electron consumption. If the card cannot be powered off the main power harness, a Beige G3 may not have the horsepower on the PCI bus to drive such a card unless it's the only card installed. Max power available to all three slots is 45W.

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Answer 2

Carl Gallo1 Author

Level 2

260 points

Aug 6, 2006 8:42 PM in response to Allan Jones

Okay, I want to thank you for your help. Unfortunately, I had to do a lot of Web-Digging to even find what I was looking for.
But, believe it or not I actually got part of the card working.
Let's remind everybody the Brand, model, etc. of this ATI card:
- PCI Version
- Diamond Stealth
- ATI Radeon 9250
- 256MB/DDR
- DVI/Dual Monitor/TV-Out
This was flashed with a 9200 ROM, and only activated 128MB of it. I have no way in testing the second display port only the DVI.
I've had some stability issues in OS X Panther, and in using ATICELLERATORII in slowing the clock speed lower than 220Mhz. It's running pretty solid now. Speed and textures in games are awesome, but I can't run it in OS 9 😟
Any insight would be appreciated.
Thank you!

Powermac G3 MT/Sonnet G4-500Mhz-OC'ed 566Mhz 75 Bus Spd. Mac OS X (10.3.9) Radeon 7000/VE 64MB, 640 MB Ram, 80 GB WD, 9GB SCSI, LiteOn DVD R+RW, USB/FW

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Answer 3

Allan Jones

Level 9

78,266 points

Aug 7, 2006 11:12 AM in response to Carl Gallo1

When the Radeon Mac Edition 9200 PCI card was first released, you couldn't even launch OS9 on a dual-boot machine. Eventually, we discovered that you have to delete ALL ATI extensions from the OS9 system folder and then apply the newer ATI extensions. Then it would run (kinda) in OS9.

Even then, my 9200 is not 100 percent reliable in OS9. Graphics-intensive games eventually lock up. It has, on the other hand, run quite happily under Jag and Panther for me.

I'm no flashing expert, so about all I can do is to provide my observations on a stock 9200. The 128MB in the 9200 does wonders for my flight sim, but seems to add little to other games. I think the other stuff is now processor bound by my 63/500 processor.

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