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.

Actually I would much rather have a 9800 PRO with the R350 core than one with the R360 core. I got a R360 core myself and it didn

The R360 overclocks well but only after given more power. It wants 1.9v nominal. The R350 doesn't require this increased voltage to overclock well... it's always been a good overclocker.Too bad about your R360 GPU. Sounds like it was a dud from the get-go. Before I updated to the Gigacube E-die BIOS this 9800 Pro would easily go to 450 on stock cooling. But the memory would only go to 370. As I write this ATITool has taken the card to 435/400 stable.I'll not be shelling out the $400-$500 for these next gen cards. I'll fly this modded 9800 for a few months till the prices on the new cards come down a bit.Regards,Greg

Yes it sure was. That is one of the reasons I don