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Articles > Sapphire Radeon 9500 review

Sapphire released 9500 128MB New Black PCB Version and many people said they couldn't get software mod failed to work, so we picked up this puppy directly from Sapphire and brought it to our office to some testing.

This is CpuZ screen shot of test machine, its overclocked Amd Xp 2100+ slapped on A7N8X with 2 Corsair XMS sticks of DDR ram:

Installation of card went smooth on fresh copy of windows xp and latest powered by drivers from ATI.com, and fired up 3dmark 2001 at performance settings in ati control panel and got this score:

Normal score for this card, now we updated our driver with "hacked" software mod version of driver and rebooted computer. After running 3dmark again we got amazing 3000 points boost

Whoa, here side by side results of 3dmark scores, top is stock card and bottom is moded card:

As you can see, software mod not only makes your Fill rate scores bigger but it boosts game performance by at least 20fps this is amazing, but we still have a lot of room to add some overclocking, we decided Rage3d will do the job right, here what we got out of this moded card:

No visible artifacts in 3dmark 2001 or Passmark 2d/3d tests, here the score we got on 3dmark with modded and overclocked card:

That's 4500+ 3dmark points increase from stock speeds! This is a proof that software mod DOES work new versions of radeon 9500 NON pro cards by Sapphire. Here to the side by side scores with moded and overclocked card score on top and moded card at stock speeds on bottom:

We also made chart of tests we ran with performance tester:

You can see after applying mod on this card 2d performance went down, but 3d went up. If your tight on budget and want good 3dcard witch wont go heavy on your pocket get this card, even without software mod and overclocking this card is great performer. Otherwise wait few months, when new ati card hits the streets radeon prices are expected to drop, and you will end up getting good deal on "older" ati cards.