9600 PRO Vmod guide [Page: 1 of 2] (TTID #284)

DISCLAIMER: if you try this modification and kill or damage your card, I or any other staff at eXtreme Reviews [or TACKtech Corp.] cannot be held responsible for the financial and emotional difficulties that may result from performing this modification. We are also not responsible for the insane speeds you may be able to reach with your card.

Before the mod, the highest VPU speed that I was able to achieve was 446MHz (from a default speed of 400MHz).

Requirements:

∙ Good soldering skills
∙ Multimeter
∙ 5K ohm trimmer pot
∙ A large heatsink
∙ Lots of patience

Before you start, you are going to need good cooling. I decided to bolt (not glue!) an old Globalwin CAK38 heatsink with the fan that came on my AMD Athlon XP 2500+.

As the picture shows, I soldered a trimmer pot (variable resistor) across these two points. The lower the resistance, the higher the voltage applied to the VPU (duh!). Therefore, on first boot up, I set the pot to 5K ohm (max).

After the modification was completed, I bolted the heatsink on. I used small rubber washers to keep the bolts from damaging the card, but for some reason a 4-way 0-ohm resistor was completely knocked off the board.

I booted the comp with the card installed (holding my finger on the GPU to stop it from burning out – bio cooling!). Artifacts everywhere.

Considering it was a 0-ohm resistor, which was probably used to bridge some connections, I decided to solder over it. I put the card back in and to my amazement, no artifacts. This time I used larger fat cardboard washers.