ok here's the deal. i sent the bios to w1zzard from techpowerup.com. this is what he found from examining it:

"hmm looks like this bios is a 16p bios .. which probably means that the bios
does not lock the pipelines but something else .. do you have a mr9800 ?"

when i asked him how he deterined that:

"just know my stuff "

i believe him. don't see any reason not to. in asking what to do next:

"can you grab atitool 0.24 beta off the forums, run it and hold shift when
cliccking "settings". the list in overclocking has a few more entries at the
end then .. could you send me those entries? "

i'm currently at work and can't do this right now... at least for another 3 hours..., but if someone else can sooner than me, please forward that info to him @ w1zzard@gmx.net.

dude... 16 pipes would frickin rule assuming the laptop doesn't melt or spontaneously combust.

i sent it to him

thanks dude.

out of courtesy I would not post his email openly -- use something like name at place dot com. thanks

p.s. I think he did it himself too. oh well -- just my precautionary nature..

actually w1zzard posted it himself in the other thread

http://notebookforums.com/showthread.php?t=59992&page=3

that might be cooler than getting 16 pipes... until you realize that your life's work is on that HD that is in the middle of the fireball ....then you'd wake up in the hospital a year after the fact, still with high blood pressure...

i really would like to see a laptop burst into a fireball because of a massivly OC'd vid card, just not MY laptop...

where is whack anyway? (vacation?)

whack's back

I fainted, woke up, and posted this useless sentence saying that I fainted. Well, done gentlemen.

16 pipes?
now wait i must be confused
if you open to 16 pipes... make sure your house is protected for fire insurance....

Now if we do some serious over clocking and pipe opening... which i hope is soon... does the XPS have an alternate or a modified cooling system... so when i have these 12 pipes open and accidently leave my computer on, i dont have to come home from work and see my XPS melted to my desk? These 12 pipes ( not mentioning 16 pipes) is goin to create some concernable heat...

Pretty sure that something like opening pipelines isn't something you can do on the fly...

i'm not too concerned about having 12 pipes, but odds are we'll only be able to run it at default clocks of 350/300. but then you never know.

now i know puters but im not much of a programmer..... why could we only run the clocks at default if we open the 4 pipes?
also when we open the 4 pipes... do we open vertex also?

overclocking while dependent on quality of your parts (memory type, timings) is also heavily dependent on heat or ability to dissipate it. opening 12 pipes will generate more heat and may limit the amount that the card can be oc'ed

as for vertex shaders, it is believed that all 6 vertex shaders are open even though only 4 are advertised. read this article

http://www.beyond3d.com/previews/ati/m18/

yes this article does have good info...

In your terms lets say we open the pipes and shaders and cant overclock ( having to leave core speed at default ) do you think its a big performance increase, cuase we have to worry about heat... well we too could just crank up fangui all the time...

oc'ed @ 425 core w/ 8 pipes
pixel/texture fill rate = 425 MHz * 8 = 3.4 G-pixels & texels / sec

stock @ 350 core w/ 12 pipes
pixel/texture fill rate = 350 MHz * 12 = 4.2 G-pixels & texels / sec

so yeah even though the core is much slower, it's still able to do more.

i don't know how to calculate memory bandwidth however, but i think it involves knowing the memory timings to calculate it properly.