Moreover, there were stories of how a regular 9500 could be modified into a 9700. The basis behind this is that the 9500 is simply the same as a 9700 save for four less rendering pipelines. The four missing pipelines are actually on the regular 9500, just that they have been disabled. So to turn a regular 9500 to a regular 9700, one would in theory just have to enable these four rendering pipelines. Industrious hackers soon found two ways to go about doing this. One is through a simple software hack; the other is to physically modify the card, which, as you can see , requires utmost skill and precision.
Another excellent example of the 9600 chipset is the GeCube RADEON 9600XT 128MB Extreme Edition . Not only did we give a full five out of five stars, it also garnered our most overclockable award. The memory on a stock card is clocked at 700MHz, but we managed to get ours all the way up to a nausea-inducing 810MHz!
Needless to say, it achieved stunning results. With the memory overclocked to such levels, it was a whopping 20% faster than most other 9600XT cards and could even go head-to-head with NVIDIA's FX 5800 and FX 5700 Ultra!