HIS IceQ 9800 Pro 128M Tips

[Devolutionist]

Just wanted to post a few things I've learned about these cards.

First the obvious stuff...

There's two versions of these cards in the market right now. The first is the initial version of the card that has the R350 core and PC board. You can easily spot this board three ways. The first is the slot covers. The older version of the board has a dual slot cover that is one solid piece that covers two slots. On April 23rd 2004, they started shipping a newer version that has two physically separate slot covers. I don't know if there's a correlation between this distinction and whether or not there is a R350 vs. R360. I do know that the first one I bought had the solid dual slot cover and it was a R350. The second one I bought had separate slot covers and was a R360. The second is the RAM heatsinks. The older cards have standard looking heat sinks, and the newer ones have a heat sink/heat spreader that "bridges" two memory modules. Again, don't know if there's a solid correlation between R350/R360 here. The third is definetly a giveaway between the R350 and R360 - the PC board layout. The older one has a heat sink directly above the "E" in "Excalibur" on the VGA Silencer. You can see this through the window of the retail box without opening it up (and perhaps ruining your chance for an RMA). This is the R350 PC board, as seen here:



The newer version with the R360 PC board is shown here:



Next, flashing from Pro to XT...

The best way to verify the chipset is to take off the VGA Silencer and look for yourself. However, a lot of people don't want to do this. An alternate method is to take a look at the text of the BIOS.

Download ATITool and dump the bios. Open it with Notepad and if you see this string:

R360 Hynix DDR 113-A18812-100 BIOS
(C) 1988-2003, ATI Technologies Inc. BK-ATI VER008.017D.029.000 nhrq6778.p00 v611 R360AGP

...then you have a R360 core and PCB. As you can also see, it uses Hynix memory.

Download Winflash , and also this BIOS that is strictly for a HIS 9800XT 128M card with Hynix memory. First, make SURE you have dumped the current BIOS and have a copy of it. Never flash anything with backing up what's already there. Once you have the current BIOS saved, rename the new bios from "HIS.9800XT.128MB.Hynix.bin" to something simple like "9800XT.bin". Use Winflash to write the new BIOS to the card. Uninstall all video drivers and Display Adapters in Device Manager and reboot. The card will now be recognized as an XT. Re-install the drivers and you're off.

Note that ATITool will now read the temps on the card. The temps will NOT be available in the ATI control panel, and neither will the Overdrive tab.

Finally, a word to anyone thinking of taking the VGA Silencer off just to re-seat it with Arctic Silver 5, Shin Etsu, or whatever your favorite thermal compound happens to be. Don't bother. When I removed mine, I was expecting to see some really weak, slapped on thermal paste. Not the case. I was very suprised to see a very neatly and evenly applied compound that appeared to be AS5. Same color and consistency. I removed the compound and put on AS5, and have a ZERO degree temp change after 3 days of burn-in. Zero idle change, zero load change.

The only thing that could be done to improve the mating surface would be to lap the VGA Silencer. The core itself has a mirror finish, as seen here:



The circle in the pic is the lens of my camera. You can also clearly see "Olympus" on the bottom.

The VGA Silencer surface has pretty bad machining marks, and could easily be lapped to a much smoother finish. Here's what it looks like after the original thermal paste was removed:



So unless you're planning on lapping the VGA Silencer, don't bother taking it off.

The card can be purchased from three online retailers: Newegg, eWiz, and SuperPCMart. Newegg is the cheapest, but is frequently out of stock, as is SuperPCMart. The two I bought were from Newegg and eWiz. The one I bought from Newegg was a R350 core, but they have since sold out of that stock and are scheduled to get more in on 8/11/2004. The new stock will likely be R360's. The second card I got was from eWiz. I'd never bought anything from them and did so only because Newegg was currently out of stock. They were $16 more expensive at the time, but the card I got was an R360. Newegg is by far the better retailer of these three (well, of anyone in my book), and I'd recommend buying it there first. As I mentioned earlier, you can eyeball the card through the window of the box and tell if it's an R350 or R360. If it's an R350, RMA it - but call to get the RMA number instead of doing it online and they'll waive your restocking fee.

I really love this card and am extremely impressed with the quality and performance I've gotten out of it. Hope this helps out anyone considering buying one.

/D.

[Ray.uk]

Have a card with the full backing plate and heatsink over the E and following your tip re bios in notepad found it is a 350 as you have stated in your post.
My point is it has the bridged heatsinks on the ram ,just for your info.

[Devolutionist]

How did you validate that it was a R350? You only know 100% if you take off the heat sink and look at the core. It's possible to have a R360 core that has a R350 BIOS loaded. Can you post the identifying text string out of your BIOS dump?

I think the net of what you're saying is that you have an R350 core and R350 board, but with the newer style ram sinks - correct? We seem to have quite a few permutations here.

I'm hazarding a guess that HIS didn't synchronize their productions runs. Apparently they started out with R350 core & board with standard heat sinks. Based on your input I'm guessing that they ran out of the standard heat sinks first (or perhaps uncovered an engineering issue with them) and switched to the newer "bridged" heat sinks. Then they ran out of R350 cores, because many people have R350 boards that have R360 cores running a R350 BIOS. Then finally they ran out of R350 boards and currently produce R360 boards using R360 cores loaded up with a R350 BIOS.

If anyone reading this has seen any other variants please post.

Thanks,
/D.

[Ray.uk]

R350 Hynix DDR BIOS - P/N 113-A07521-104
(C) 1988-2003, ATI Technologies Inc. BK-ATI VER008.015.081.000 nhrq5690.p04 v611 R350AGP DGD1UN

Paid a little extra for the cooling setup on this card,to save myself the hassle so dont really want to strip it down.Will be happy just to overclock it a little.Flashing to XT never really crossed my mind.

[Banditblue]

bridged heatsinks here.looks i have r360 confirmed.R360 Hynix DDR 113-A18812-100 BIOS
(C) 1988-2003, ATI Technologies Inc. BK-ATI VER008.017D.029.000

[Jonbo298]

In ATI Tool, I click dump bios and it closes out the program and thats it. I looked in hte ati tool folder but there isnt anything there hinting at what might be the dumped bios. Where is it stored?

[Banditblue]

C:\Program Files\ATITool,where mine is anyhow.lemme clarifyy.it is a bin image file-52kb

[Devolutionist]

In ATI Tool, I click dump bios and it closes out the program and thats it. I looked in hte ati tool folder but there isnt anything there hinting at what might be the dumped bios. Where is it stored?

Shound be a file in the ATI Tool installation folder called "bios.bin". Search your hard drive for that file name and it should pop up. ATITool doesn't give you any feedback that it's done anything when you click the "Dump Bios" button.

Right click "bios.bin" and select "Open with..." and choose notepad. The strings you're looking for are at the top few lines of the code.

[Devolutionist]

R350 Hynix DDR BIOS - P/N 113-A07521-104
(C) 1988-2003, ATI Technologies Inc. BK-ATI VER008.015.081.000 nhrq5690.p04 v611 R350AGP DGD1UN

Paid a little extra for the cooling setup on this card,to save myself the hassle so dont really want to strip it down.Will be happy just to overclock it a little.Flashing to XT never really crossed my mind.

Very understandable. Let's all be clear on the fact that actions like taking off your heatsink, certainly flashing BIOS all void your warranty! If you're cool with how it performs, no point in mucking around with it! I've flashed my BIOS but haven't overclocked yet because I'm satisfied with my card's performance with it's new XT clothes on...

[Prospector]

My Sapphire shows R360 doing the bin dump and reading with notepad.
Sandra shows R350

[Jonbo298]

I searched for the bios.bin file and it never found anything. hmm.....

[Devolutionist]

My Sapphire shows R360 doing the bin dump and reading with notepad.
Sandra shows R350

Then you likely have an R360. Sandra just reports what the code in the BIOS tells it to report. If you have the header string in your BIOS dump that mentions an R360, then you should be good to go. Keep a copy of the dump, and if it doesn't work you can always flash back. If your card gets totally screwed up somehow in the flashing process, you'll need to put in a PCI vid card, get it installed, and once your pc comes back up you'll be able to re-flash using winflash.

Just for posterity, here's the exact header string out of my original BIOS that was reporting my card as a R350:

R360 Hynix DDR 113-A18812-100 BIOS
(C) 1988-2003, ATI Technologies Inc. BK-ATI VER008.017D.029.000 nhrq6778.p00 v611 R360AGP

...and here's the string from the HIS 9800 XT bios that I flashed it with (link to it in my initial post):

R360 Hynix DDR BIOS - P/N 113-A07521-104
(C) 1988-2003, ATI Technologies Inc. BK-ATI VER008.015.081.000 jhrq5690.p04 v611 R360AGP

Yours may not match my original one (although I'd be interested to hear if it did), but if the BIOS states that it's an R360 and your board layout matches the R360 PCB description I gave earlier, you should be good to go with BIOS flashing using the BIOS I linked to in the initial post - *IF* you have a HIS IceQ 9800 Pro 128M.

[Devolutionist]

I searched for the bios.bin file and it never found anything. hmm.....

OK - let's make sure we're looking for the same thing. I'm using ATITool v0.0.20.c. Click "Settings", then the "Misc" tab. Click "Dump Bios" and it pops up a box saying "53248 Bytes successfully saved to bios.bin".

If you don't get that pop up box saying it saved the dump to bios.bin, then you have a problem. Should save bios.bin to the "C:\Program Files\ATITool" directory. Try uninstalling ATITool and re-installing... Latest version can be downloaded from ocfaq.

[Jonbo298]

Wow, that was odd. I uninstalled Atitool, reinstalled it. Got the same error at the beginning (I forgot it already) and trid the dump. Didn't work. So I closed program. Reopened it and no errors, and now FINALLY it dumped my bios.

And I have the R350 but my memory is different from everyone else's. Mine is Samsung

R350 Samsung DDR BIOS - P/N 113-A07502-106
(C) 1988-2002, ATI Technologies Inc. BK-ATI VER008.004.008.018

and btw..I got the card from Newegg on March 25th of this year (2004)

*edit*
And also, mine has the bridged heatsinks on the RAM but not the seperate slot for the switch. Its dual slot

[Devolutionist]

And also, mine has the bridged heatsinks on the RAM but not the seperate slot for the switch. Its dual slot

Look at the board layout - the capacitor placement, etc. Does it match the top picture or to bottom picture?

So far it's looking very R350-ish - especially considering the time frame of when you got it from Newegg.