Radeon 9000 Pro AGP Flashing

[obsolete]

I was buying stuff from Japan a while back and threw in a cheap Radeon 9000 Pro AGP card. My half-baked plan was to steal its 3.3ns RAM and try to build the world's fastest Radeon 8500. I'm not up for that tedious (and probably pointless) of a project right now, but I wanted to do something with it, so I decided to flash it to Mac and see how it performs.

I gave it a basic check in a PC first and it seemed good, so I flashed it with the OEM 9000 Pro ROM from The Mac Elite and got a screen full of garbage. There's information out there about needing to move resistors for the Radeon 9000 non-Pro, which has a different board layout, but I thought the Pro was supposed to just work.

Like the 9200/9250, the 9000 Pro has a bunch of 10k ohm strap resistors scattered around the board. After some poking around, I found the ones that needed to be moved in order for the card to work. Funny enough, it was the same as a Radeon 9250, which shows just how similar these designs are. R227 and R229 needed to move to R228 and R230. They're under the heatsink to the left of the GPU:


In the picture above, you can see I've already moved them. I'm not aware that this has been documented anywhere else, so now it's here.

Unfortunately, the card is only mostly working for me; I get some scattered artifacts even at modest (275MHz GPU, 250MHz RAM) clock speeds. Maybe the card is actually defective? Its PC ROM was clocked at 275/275, so I'm not pushing it hard at all. I think it'll go back in the "projects for later" box for a while.

 

[GRudolf94]

I am finding that that era of video card is not aging well. Lots of RAM failures (to be fair, several were already dying of that years ago), and people carelessly shipping them around resulting in cracked solder balls/failed pads and the like.

Not sure what your basic check comprised, but I've had to stress-test cards a bit in a PC sometimes for a flaw to show - some cards will only crash after you install the driver and try to use more than a basic framebuffer, but immediately conk out in a Sun or Mac. Doing it at stock clocks is not a good sign.

 

[herd]

Thanks for posting this! It seems like a lot of those cards had small coolers. Does temperature change the artifact behavior? Changing the voltage might also help.

 

[obsolete]

Thanks guys. Yeah, cards from this era can be somewhat fragile, especially the BGA parts. More reason to try to preserve them, I guess.

I admit, I've been too lazy to install a version of Windows on the old P4 motherboard I'm using to test AGP cards. I just booted it into DOS and ran it though all the R6XMEMID tests once, which passed.

The RV250s on the Radeon 9000s (and RV280s on 92x0s) seem to run remarkably cool, especially compared to the "performance" cores. Some did not ship with a fan, just a passive heatsink. This one has a small heatsink with fan in good shape, and doesn't get much above 50C even under heavy use. The RAM doesn't get very hot either. The artifacts don't appear to be correlated with temperature.

I played with it a little more and made some weird observations. Changing the GPU/RAM clock speed in the ROM from 250/275 MHz to 275/275 significantly reduced the artifacts. Going farther, to 290/290, actually resolves all of the 2D artifacting, with only some slight glitching in 3D remaining. 300/300 was stable, but no better than 290/290. Since when does increasing clock speed produce fewer errors? Seems like there's some kind of timing issue here.

 

[GRudolf94]

If the RAM wasn't being refreshed fast enough it'd lose data. But that would be a rather extreme case. Odd ROM behavior depending on strap settings?

 

[obsolete]

Odd ROM behavior depending on strap settings?

That's kind of what I'm suspecting. I thought it would be a slam dunk because my card has the same RAM as at least one of the Apple variants I can find pictures of:


There was also apparently one with 4ns Samsung RAM, which should only be good for 250MHz:


I don't think that either of the ROMs uploaded to The Mac Elite could've come from the second card, since they both have the RAM clocked at 275MHz. Both of the cards above are 64MB. There was also apparently a 128MB version, but I can't find any pictures of it.

If anyone reading this has a real Apple Radeon 9000 card, I'd be curious what kind of RAM it has, especially if you'd be willing and able to dump its ROM with Graphiccelerator.

 

[obsolete]

Did a little more searching; these 9000 cards are a real crap shoot. There are at least 4 variants. Here's a 64MB card with 3.6ns Hynix RAM (that's 275MHz):


Here's a 128MB card. It also uses 4ns Samsung RAM: