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
87C is too high for my tastes. :eek:
My 6870 is loud. It annoys me. I'm not anticipating that the 6950 I have on the way will be any better.
The heatsink itself is very good. It's the paddle wheel fan that is the problem.
My thought is to remove that fan while leaving the heatsink in place, and put a 120 fan at the rear blowing down the length of the card, using shroud of some sort to funnel the air to the heatsink.
This would be both quieter and I think cooler. :D
My worry is getting the cooler back together in case I'm wrong! :eek:
More thoughts: I think if more people tested thier oc's/mods throughly, they'd notice instability as well. I don't think this is a manufacture specific issue. I think 99.9% of the 6950 gpus out there can do full shaders at 800mhz, but most can't do full shaders at 880. Also, these 6950 cards are built with slower ram chips as well based on the info we've seen from the ram product numbers. Expecting your ram to go from 1250 to 1375 is unrealistic.
Conclusion: Buyer be educated, buyer beware. Go into this knowing that if you have a reference card, you're getting a great deal. Have realistic expectations.
I had to set for Asus HD6950 bios that unlocks shader cores - Asus Smart doctor recognizes them also not like HD6970 bios. I increased Vcore to 1.170 on both cards and had 940Mhz stable withb 1300 Mhz memory.
That's te way to go for those with artifacting cards.
more on topic
i wonder if anyone as tested the performance difference between 6950 ram speeds and 6970 speeds on there cards after flashing to see if theres a performance gain or loss since if the rams clocked to high the gpus will just work around it but at a penalty to performance.