Introduction

ATI has recently released the 9550 series, which is a low cost down-cut version of the 9600. Unlike the 9500NP/9800SE/X800 Pro there are no additional pipes to be unlocked, but you can overclock it. Clock speeds are 250/200. Since the 9600 chip can clock A LOT faster than that, ATI added an overclocking protection in the Catalyst drivers. When you set clocks, they reset back to default after a few seconds or when a game is loaded.
There are modded drivers out there (including our softmod drivers) which circumvent that lock, ATITool can even remove it at runtime, but many people would prefer to use ATI's original drivers - that's where the Bios flash described here comes into play.

Performing the mod

Before flashing:

1. Download a 9600 Pro Bios which matches your card's configuration.
   For example, if you have Samsung 4.0/5.0 you could use the Powercolor 9600 Pro 128 MB Bios dated 2003-08-23 11:56. Our large Bios collection can be found here.
   Make sure that the card works stable at the clocks the Bios you want to flash uses. The 9550 I tested on reached 450 MHz core and 265 MHz mem.
2. Flash the Bios file to your video card using the -f parameter. For example flashrom -f -p 0 9600.bin.
   A little sidenote: Many people complain that they get a "file not found" error when trying to flash the Bios under DOS. The problem is that DOS does not know long filenames, so all files are truncated to some funky names like Powerco~1.bin. Either use the dir command, when in DOS, to find out the short filename or rename it to something shorter while still in Windows.
   More extensive flashing instructions can be found here. They talk about atiflash - you use flashrom since atiflash does not support the 9550, usage is the same.
3. After flashing, Windows will recognize a "RADEON 9600 Series" video card with a device id of 0x4152 which is NOT clock locked.
   

After flashing: