I bought the r98-sc3 card. now ive read some people that bought this card flashed the bios and got it to 9800pro mode.

the omega drivers softmod did not work for me. i got artifacts. is there any way that i can get my 9800se to a 9800pro without getting artifacts. im going to buy a vga cooler even if i cant softmod it, but i just wanna know if i can without getting artifacts

Flashing the BIOS wont help. If the soft modded driver didnt work, you got artifacts, that means 4 of the rendering pipelines are damaged or just wont work. Since that card has 256bit memory you will still get very good performance. There isnt a huge difference with the extra 4 pipes enabled. The first one I got didnt take the mod but luckily it went bad a few weeks later and the replacement card did mod. Deffinately get the VGA cooler. That card runs extremely hot.