Poll: What caused your flashed 6950 permanent damage?

[searingmage]

So, now that the new driver is coming out, let's see if the status of those who has damaged card changed. Perhaps it is driver issue only all along, or perhaps it's really damaged.

 

[ctn]

17 dead cards were send to RMA last week from the shop, that I'm working in. Here (on TPU) there is more than 5 persons with problems (not driver related) with HD6970 bios on a wrong card. 2 or 3 on Xtremesystems. On three polish forums tham I'm addicted to (nvision,purepc,benchmark), there are more than 10 permanently damaged HD6950. All damaged cards have HD6970 bios.

I don't want to spend more time arguing that HD6970 bios on HD6950 card is bad thing since there is proper and simple solution (modded HD6950). This is my last post in this discussion, because it's just stupid. People like to learn on their own mistakes I think.

Do you have any screenshots/pictures of these artifacts?

Best way to put this to rest.

 

[lt007]

my vote suggestion on 3rd number

 

[SoCalRailRoader]

1. Yes even 1 hour of wrong bios can damage the card.
2. When you have damaged card, you will see it in regular use. If green dots are showing you damaged your card. Mine HD4850 showed them after 2 weeks.
3. Unlocking shaders is safe. OCing with unlocked bios is also safe (somehow).

I used the Modded 6950 BIOS Method, do I need to raise the voltages at all? I have the PowerColor HD 6950-

http://powercolor.com/us/products_features.asp?id=311#Specification

Thanks guys! I'm brand new to these forums, though not the tech world by any means I have found a lot of other good stuff on here, I'm looking forward to getting involved!

 

[SoCalRailRoader]

Wow, this thread is kinda dead

 

[BababooeyHTJ]

No you shouldn't need to touch the voltage with a modded bios.

 

[xt486]

Jitters on new HD6950 to hd6970 o/c

Sorry for piggybacking off your topic, but since I o/c my card to HD6970 bios, while doing general surfing and e-mail stuff I have noticed jitters and artifacts on the screen, this happens while not playing any games or videos. Sometimes it goes black for second, I have connected my screen to my laptop but no evidence of the faults, I have moved the card to another PCI slot, but still the same happens, Have I fried my card? Should I just take it back? it is 3 weeks old, Thanks Xt486

 

[arroyo]

@xt486
Yes, you probably killed your card while using HD6970 bios. Why didn't you used the HD6950 bios with unlockes shaders? Your PSU looks ok, so it's not PSU problem.

 

[BababooeyHTJ]

Sorry for piggybacking off your topic, but since I o/c my card to HD6970 bios, while doing general surfing and e-mail stuff I have noticed jitters and artifacts on the screen, this happens while not playing any games or videos. Sometimes it goes black for second, I have connected my screen to my laptop but no evidence of the faults, I have moved the card to another PCI slot, but still the same happens, Have I fried my card? Should I just take it back? it is 3 weeks old, Thanks Xt486

Was it ever stable after the flash? Did you try and increase powertune? That seems to help some people.


Flip the switch to position 2 and uninstall your current display drivers and either reinstall or install the latest display drivers. Then do a little testing. If it works fine flash back to the factory bios.

@xt486
Yes, you probably killed your card while using HD6970 bios. Why didn't you used the HD6950 bios with unlockes shaders? Your PSU looks ok, so it's not PSU problem.

You were able to diagnose his machine based on that short post alone. Thats amazing.

 

[Wijkert]

@xt486
Yes, you probably killed your card while using HD6970 bios. Why didn't you used the HD6950 bios with unlockes shaders? Your PSU looks ok, so it's not PSU problem.

I have to agree with BababooeyHTJ. You seem to scare a lot of people with your statements about their cards being dead. You can't know for shure before they have been tested extensively.

 

[searingmage]

Sorry for piggybacking off your topic, but since I o/c my card to HD6970 bios, while doing general surfing and e-mail stuff I have noticed jitters and artifacts on the screen, this happens while not playing any games or videos. Sometimes it goes black for second, I have connected my screen to my laptop but no evidence of the faults, I have moved the card to another PCI slot, but still the same happens, Have I fried my card? Should I just take it back? it is 3 weeks old, Thanks Xt486

Try reverting it back to 6950 bios. Then see if the problem persist. If it persist... then... maybe your card is fried, or maybe there's some other problems. But anyways, modded 6950 with unlocked shaders is safer from what I observe so far.. So, if your card isn't fried, change it to modded 6950 instead of using 6970 bios. OC the core only, don't oc the memory. And, if it's fried, hopefully you can still unlock your shaders after rma.

 

[kiddagoat]

I think I might be one of the few that has attempted this mod with success and I did use a 6970 BIOS on my 6950.

I have a 6950 from XFX and I used the 6970 XFX BIOS from the collection. I have yet to find a link to a BIOS that is modded for just shaders only. I tried that pack that was linked on page 3 and I do believe that is the same thing that W1zzard linked in his article as a helpful "kit" to help people and it still has a 6970 BIOS or at least on mine it changed the speeds and shaders to the same thing that the XFX BIOS did.

I have left the XFX 6970 BIOS on my card, turned the fan up to about 75% and I am not having any temperature issues/artifacting/tearting or anything like that. I did have a bad driver install because I used the 11.1a hotfix.

I went back to the 10.12a hotfix and I have no more problems as described in my other thread.

I have tried FurMark, Unigine, Source Benchmark, and Lost Planet 2 with no issues whatsoever.

With the 10.12a drivers and the 6970 BIOS I noticed in FurMark on my particular card that the fan wasn't kicking on and just sat at 25%. My temps went from 25C up to 91C. After manually adjusting the fan they don't get above 60C in FurMark.

I have not had any problems with my card and do not see anything wrong with it.

Should the time come and it does end up dead on me, I invested the extra $30 at the time of purchase and got a replacement plan on it. So if needed, I can get a new card and not shell out the extra $300.

 

[xt486]

HD 6950 flicker

Mr Goat, that plan of the $30 scheme is good, I will up my card fan to 55% then play some games, run Furmark and see what happens.

 

[gareth170]

i can show you videos of what i thought was a failure but is nothing but driver/game engine bugs
like
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KDHvow6ILpQ
and
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_NX96OHZ-lw



edit: sorry for the double post

yeah i get that.... it's just a driver bug....

anyway if people's 6950 are breaking after flashing it's either they using the 6970 bios or pumping way to much voltage though it or letting it get to hot or driver bugs or they don't know what they doing....

my 6950 has been perfectly fine for many weeks now using the 6950 unlocked shaders bios, i game at 930/1450 1.175v

 

[Andrei23]

bah
neither modded bios nor 6970 bios seem to work without crashing for me so I went back to just a plain old 6950

 

[purecain]

Mr Goat, that plan of the $30 scheme is good, I will up my card fan to 55% then play some games, run Furmark and see what happens.

i would flash the card back as you may be damaging the card using it with that bios...

although i doubt it, just flash back to be safe....

try the bios switch on the card first.... good luck with it...

 

[Anvirol]

Hardware failures happen even without unlocking etc. You should have added an option for "No malfunctions" so we see the failure quantities in perspective.

And I've got a feeling that some of these "failures" are due to user not reading instructions carefully, not hardware

 

[ghen]

People, I cannot get this 6950 shader unlock bios working... I was using 6970 bioses but Im afraid to go on anymore

I downloaded the file,there's a run.bat , a folder called php , mod.php file . I put them into same folder with my stock bios named original.bin , and i run the run.bat , it says press a button , and then displays the error "System cannot find the path specified."

 

[zhadlp]

my 1st unlock HD6950 had an issue with the fan after 2 weeks, not sure why, but its stuck at 100%, tried a lot of programs to adjust the fan speed, but even if I set it to 20%, worked fine before the fan issue though, no game issues whatsoever.

my 2nd unlocked HD6950 has had no issues running HD6970 900/1450 clocks for a month now, and this machine is running almost 24/7, no glitches, artifacts, or fan issues, so I'm happy with it...

 

[ghen]

Ok just flashed my 6950 to 6970 Bios with Asus this time.
Is there anything wrong here ? I followed the steps from :
http://www.overclock.net/ati/923129-hd-6950-810-1250-mhz-shader.html

It says Your GPU voltage will now be 1.175V , should I play with the voltage or it should stay the same?
But the case is,they use 6950 bios-shader unlock, but I cannot apply that,so I went with Asus 6970 bios..

 

[Intelman]

Hm maybe my card is dying. 11.1a seems to have introduced quite a bit of instabilities for me. Not cool. I will try reverting. 11.1a improves 69xx performance though with its new shader model.

XFX 6950 was on 6970 for a week, then switched to 6950 unlocked. All was fine until 11.1a.

 

[largon]

heres some youtube vids of my artifacts
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KDHvow6ILpQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meJvZav_Ux4

Memory artifacts.

Those in the 1st vid are rendering glitches and not RAM errors. Such "sparklies" are typical GPU errors, RAM errors would look like corrupt/missing/flashing textures.
And I don't see anything wrong in 2nd vid.

 

[ghen]

People, I cannot get this 6950 shader unlock bios working... I was using 6970 bioses but Im afraid to go on anymore

I downloaded the file,there's a run.bat , a folder called php , mod.php file . I put them into same folder with my stock bios named original.bin , and i run the run.bat , it says press a button , and then displays the error "System cannot find the path specified."

Noone?

 

[BababooeyHTJ]

Those in the 1st vid are rendering glitches and not RAM errors. Such "sparklies" are typical GPU errors, RAM errors would look like corrupt/missing/flashing textures.
And I don't see anything wrong in 2nd vid.

Actually they are both known driver issues.

 

[largon]

Right-o...
So pretty much everyone using a 6900-serie card gets artifacts?