ATI Mobility Mod to FireGL T2

[Neero]

Hi I've been reading a lot of posts regarding Mobile Graphics card that can handle Maya, 3Dmax , etc... ofcourse the its easy to say just Get a T4xp. I do not have a thinkpad yet but I am very interested in the T42 with the 9600 instead of the FireGL due to the costs. (no EPP )
I do a lot of Maya modeling and in need of a portable solution with great batterylife. I will do Final production rendering on a desktop PC but it would be nice to at least have an openGL accurate portable to do test renders and modelling on the go.

According to these posts/articles it is possible to mod a 9x00 ATI cards to Fire GL versions .. Has anyone tried this on their Thinkpads yet?
the second URL deals with desktop cards mainly.

http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php ... did=139094

http://www.rojakpot.com/showarticle.asp ... 105&pgno=0

[Navck]

Only if they now have the X300.

[rssb]

The mod's suggested on adrian rojakpot's site are mainly aimed at the cards or systems which have seperate GPU cards, which is equivalent of saying the video bios resides on the card .

Now in the thinkpads, the video bios is part of the main bios and the way it picks up whether it is a regular radeon or Fire GL is going by the chip firmware, the main bios has the same code whether it is a Firegl or Radeon ( == same bios for T40/p, T41/p and T42/p which has all the video bioses fro M7,M9, M10)

If there is a way to change the sub firmware naming ( i.e from 4E50 to 4E54) then may be you might be able to perform the mod. But i guess that is something which ATI must be closely guarding.

In conclusion, it is not easy to do if not impossible.

[Neero]

the person in the 3D site seems to have success in patching his mobility 9600 so it would seem its not impossible. As for the x300, i have no clue. Perhaps its in the works.

On the rojak site however as i said is about desktop cards. I have used the easy way as described there if you forward on the article, and patched my Desktop 8500le and it seems to be working. I used the old version of the FreeFireGL 8x00 software that the russian site provided a while ago.

I do not have a notebook computer that has the mobility 9600 so i can not try it. I do have a 9200 mobility but the patch does not work since there are no Fire GL cards based on 9200 i guess. But some people had success on the 9000.

[Neero]

I looked further in the 3D forums and found this discussion: regarding the x300

http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php ... genumber=1

on the 3d site there were no mention of BIOS flashing , but just using Rivatuner and patch editing.

I will research this further and hopefully try it when i get access to a moblity 9600 and/or x300

[Navck]

Interesting. Tell me if you have this done... As I would love to have a FireGL (Software wise) on my TP