Sunday, December 26th 2010
AMD Radeon HD 6950 Can be Unlocked to HD 6970
Looks like Santa brought an extra present for us hardware enthusiasts this year. Thanks to a less secure locking method AMD's new Radeon HD 6950 can be unlocked to a full blown HD 6970 with a few mouse clicks.
As detailed in our article, you can safely perform the flashing process from within Windows. In case something goes wrong it is easier than ever to recover the card thanks to AMD's new Dual-BIOS feature.
We tested the unlock on three HD 6950 cards: one AMD engineering sample, one HIS media sample and one ASUS retail card. All of them unlocked perfectly and run at HD 6970 speeds now. More success reports are compiled into a table at the end of the modding article.
As detailed in our article, you can safely perform the flashing process from within Windows. In case something goes wrong it is easier than ever to recover the card thanks to AMD's new Dual-BIOS feature.
We tested the unlock on three HD 6950 cards: one AMD engineering sample, one HIS media sample and one ASUS retail card. All of them unlocked perfectly and run at HD 6970 speeds now. More success reports are compiled into a table at the end of the modding article.
302 Comments on AMD Radeon HD 6950 Can be Unlocked to HD 6970
oh well thanks for bringing it to are attention will definetly help some ppl save a bit of money
Yea after I buy a second 5850 this pops up.
EDIT
Do all the flashed cards support 6970 stock clocks?
I was going to wait until nvidia's next card comes out to lower prices to get a second, but now I may just go ahead and buy another just incase they change this in a later revision.
Got a Gigabyte 6950 on the way, if, the UPS man can get though the snow.
Hopefully, I'll see it tomorrow or the next day.
I will have to try this out...
:)
Have a 6950 Powercolor here and I'm so going to try this. :rockout:
HOLD THE BOAT....
Is this what the delay was all about? CD at S/A had an article about 6970 stocks being higher than expected and 6950 stocks being very low. Was the delay caused by the last minute BIOS fiddlings to make more 6950's out of the 6970 cards?
Plausible?
configuring the bios is like 3 mouse clicks for amd, i doubt that's the reason for the delay
here is what GPU-Z gives me on a retail ASUS 6970:
Edit: Validation is here.
grab this one:
[GPU-Z Test Build] Support for AMD Radeon HD 6950...
thanks. fixed the link in the article and will release a new official build in the next few days