New card and softmodding - which direction?

My system is about 4 years old now, built by my own hands and its been a good reliable system. I believe the video card is starting to die out... and that soon a new card is in order. I've been reading up on the ATI 9500np/9500pro and the 9700np/9700pro. As my sig points out, the 9500pro is a "wish" item of mine that I plan on purchasing when I feel the time is right. As for now, I started noticing stuff about softmodding the 9500np. What exactly is this process, what does it do, and where can I read more about it? Does it work for a 9500pro? Any gains to the card or system performance. For those of you reading my system specs and thinking "your cpu... or well, the rest of your computer is a bottleneck" I know this. The video card is a first buy towards a new system. Just wondering about what card to get and how I would go about softmodding it. Any help/responses appreciated :)

Dave

Only the 9500 Non-Pro with red PCB and L-shaped ram can even attempt to do it, even then its not a guarentee, and if it does it may have weird quarks to it. There is a gain, as modding a 9500 into a 9700, changes the memory bandwidth from 128bit to 256bit, and opens up the 4 additional pipelines making it 8 instead of 4. I got about a 3500-4000 3dmark2k1se addition from doing the softmod, still no overclock on the video card.