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Quite a few Radeon X1800 GTO's can't be unlocked |
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Written by Mavke
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Thursday, 27 April 2006 |
The recent price drops of selected ATI boards has aroused plenty of reaction among our readers, but every shiny coin has its flipside, and this isn't any different. One of the price reduced products, the Radeon X1800GTO, just follows the path of the Radeon X800 GT and GTO, a fully featured product as the elder sibling, but with some of the hardware features turned off. A place for dies that did not made the cut. The Radeon X1800 GTO uses the PCB and the cooling solution from the XL, but the BIOS contains the code which disables a pixel quad. So four pixel shader units are disabled. Sadly, the card also inherited one annoying issue present with the original XL, a loud on and off spinning cooler.
 Quite a few Radeon X1800 GTO's can't be unlocked
However, if you can unlock the four pixel shaders, you would be in for a sweet deal. But, not all products can be unlocked. As a reader reported to us, there is a bit of a difference between card manufacturers, so we went up to dig up some details and here are the results. We asked several readers and retail shop reps to come back to us with results of their testing. The best unlocker is allegedly the Radeon X1800 GTO manufactured by Connect3D or HIS. One PC manufacturer claims every Connect3D card was safely unlocked to a Radeon X1800 XL, which supported the claim of our reader.
With HIS, many of the cards can be unlocked, but not all. However, the Sapphire boards can't be unlocked, it appears. If you're a fanatic and shopping for a new card, think about Connect3D or HIS. And keep your fingers crossed. The alternative is, of course, the GeForce 7600 GT from NVIDIA.
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