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
My theory is that MAD knew of this already and since the positioning of 6970 is in no-man's land, the free advertizing generated from this "feature" would sell more than enough 6950's to cover caniballized 6970 sales.
And I bought one. I'm so ashamed. It's like I paid a prostitute for the gratification. :D
Sapphire's on amazon is $292.50, btw. I wish I could hold out till the 3rd party coolers are available, but I guess I don't want to risk AMD actually fusing them.
The dual-bios is starting to make sense, no point getting your noob 6950 customers bricking their cards performing their "free" upgrade.
Go Green Team! Or is it Team Green?
thats some incredible performance per dollar
also is there a reason mine is showing 1600 shaders.
hope it works with me
[GPU-Z Test Build] Support for AMD Radeon HD 6950...
took to fast to figure this out
Metro 2033
Alien Vs Predator
both scale and are far faster on the new cards by a landslide just DX9 and DX10 there on par or 20% faster *usually* but there are weird situations
example Bad Company 2 regular multiplayer xfire scaling is 18% Bad Company 2 Vietnam multiplayer scaling for me is around 82-85% and at those frame rates its about 35-40fps more then my 5850 oc xfire setup was
to be blunt theres far more games out there then the 5-10 you see in reviews and the games that need the xtra performance the 6900s do there share of improving :toast:
580 replaced 480 took a step up
570 = 480
560 = 470
550 = 460
so on and etc
also I have to stick to a 500w PSU budget nowadays.