10 days ago Fry's had a sale on ATI 9800Pro cards... $200.00US for the genuine article. A friend of mine had offered me $150.00 for my 9700Pro recently so I called him up to seal the deal. Threw the extra required $50.00 into my pocket and headed down to pick up a new 9800Pro. I got the last one on the shelf that didn't have a "return item" sticker on it. Got it installed and happy in my XP system, and then started playing around with overclocking it. I was able to easily get from the stock Pro speeds (380/240) to XT specs (412/365).Last week I ordered a new Arctic Cooler VGA Silencer and some OCZ ramsinks. They arrived today, so naturally I set about installing them. Imagine my surprise when after removing the stock heatsink/fan and cleaning the thermal grease away that sitting there nice and pretty on the GPU I saw this: R360! That's the GPU used on the XT cards! So I quickly rounded up all I needed to flash the card's BIOS to an XT version, and VIOLA!!! Windows now sees the card as a 9800XT (both in the drivers tweaker and DirectX), and the card is humming along at 440/395!Seems that manufacturers like ATI, Sapphire, and Powercolor are clearing out all their inventory of R350 and R360 GPU's, and there's no telling what version of GPU is ending up on the 9800Pro cards.Of course, the downside in all this is that it's crap shoot. Purely luck of the draw. But there has to be quite an inventory of the R360 GPU's (XT's didn't sell all that well... for the additional cost not that much more performance than the Pro).So, for anyone thinking about taking advantage of the price drops of the current gen cards as both ATI and nVidia prepare to launch their next offerings (for around $500.00), now might be the time strike.Have fun,GregP.S. Newegg has all three cards (ATI, Sapphire, and Powercolor) and the prices can't be beat.

wow...that sounds cool :Dmight try that out;)what did u get exactly for the BIOS ?Dario

I settled on the Gigacube E-die BIOS afrer trying a few. Instructions on how to flash the BIOS are here: http://www.rage3d.com/board/showthread.php...00Pro+to+9800xtNote that the linked thread is for flashing a 9800NP to a Pro, but the process is the same no matter what card. A list of BIOS choices is here: http://softmod.ocfaq.com/bios.phpAt the bottom of that page is a list of Flashrom.exe choices. Use the 2.23 version.You must first inspect the card to see what GPU and ram is on it. Make sure you use a BIOS for your GPU/ram combo. Even if your card has the standard R350 GPU you can often gain more speed by changing to another BIOS.Hope this helps,Greg

thanks for the tips..ill certainly look into it...btw...how is the silent vga cooler...im thinking of getting one too;)dario

The Silencer is OK as a standard cooling choice. It was never intended to be an extreme solution. The heatsink itself is very nice, but the fan is a bit weak for extreme cooling. The single flaw in the design is that the heatsink/cooling fin body doesn't extend far enough to the video card back plate. It comes up about 7mm short!!! Can't figure out what the makers were thinking there! The idea is to direct the hot air out the back of the case, but much of that air ends up being dumped back into the case. From my perspective the design really fails in this regard. (I resolved this problem by adding some aluminum tape to the end of the snout that extends to the back plate. Now I do have flow out the back of the video card back plate.)I've given some thought to replacing the standard fan with an extension snout and then adding a standard 80mm fan. This would move much more air through the cooler. As it is now, I don't see the silencer as a device that does much more than the stock cooler.Bottom line... great idea that needs a better fan, and of course extend the exit all the way to the VC back plate. Truthfully, if I had to do it over again I would have gone for one of the 1u heatsinks. But I'll try to make the Silencer work the way I want it to (as in extreme solution without alot of noise).Hope this helps,Greg