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Was it a mistake to "unlock" or "remove unlocking" on 6950's

555BUK

555BUK

555BUK

Soldato
Joined
10 Feb 2007
Posts
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I wonder how much removing the possibility of unlocking 6950's is costing AMD at the moment? I would buy a 6950 today if I got "something for free" other than a Dirt 3 code, but unfortunately my money gets me less now than when these cards were released. Also, current cards do not seem to overclock as well, even though many have superior cooling. Perhaps the cherry picked GPU's were released on day 1, and now we get the jaffer parts?

Is anyone else put off, and was it a bigger mistake to unlock initial cards or to subsequently remove the unlocking? Currently, the massive overclocking headroom, lower cost, and cooler running of NVidia's 560TI parts seems the better bet.

Opinions?
 
Maybe it harms their sales of 6970s by allowing unlocking 6950s.

To be honest, unlocking the shaders from 1408 to 1536 would only give you around 3% performance increase alone, if at the same clock speed. This is explained by Amdahl's Law. However most people would want to unlock just to *feel* better with something that is not castrated..

With the MSI Twin Frozr III, you can simply overclock it past the clock speed of reference 6970 easily and beat. I would still prefer 6950 2GB over 560 1GB because it leaves better room for future crossfirex. If you listen to bhavv's comments regarding vram, non of us would need more than a single byte of vram rather than TurboCache or HyperMemory.
 
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Just shows how good their production is that they actually took top end gpu's and had to cripple them to sell as a lower spec, rather than going the nvidia route and selling failed top end gpu's as lower spec ones.

It was a mistake leaving the ability to unlock them in though, obviously. They put an end to that one quickly.
 
Should have left the 6950 unlockable, retired the 6970(not many around anyway)and brought out a 6980 beast which would have sold better assuming a big enough performance gap.:)
 
You wanna know what's the mistake? The price points of the cards and using 1GB model to fill the price gap.

In my opinion the GTX560Ti 2GB and 6950 2GB should at the price point of where their 1GB models are (£170~£190), not £200+, and there should have been no need for the 1GB model at all.

And then considering the 6970 2GB speed/performance vs the 6950 2GB (being only around 3% faster), it really shouldn't be priced as high as £270...it should be priced at £220~£240.
 
The 6870 costs £140 atm, thats £280 for two.

The 6870 X2 costs far too much more.

2 x 6870 is a very solid setup for the price.
 
Yesterday 2 X 6870 was £249.98 :eek: bargain in my opinion though for the performance only 1Gb of memory is criminal. Amd\Nvidia really need to find a way to address both graphics cards memory(2x1Gb=2Gb) or these setups will cease to be attractive, if they aren't already.
 
Marine-RX179 said:
You wanna know what's the mistake? The price points of the cards and using 1GB model to fill the price gap.

In my opinion the GTX560Ti 2GB and 6950 2GB should at the price point of where their 1GB models are (£170~£190), not £200+, and there should have been no need for the 1GB model at all.

And then considering the 6970 2GB speed/performance vs the 6950 2GB (being only around 3% faster), it really shouldn't be priced as high as £270...it should be priced at £220~£240.
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What are you talking about, a 6970 is not 3% faster than a 6950, clock for clock it is, both cards at stock, they aren't 3% apart, not even close. Likewise, you charge an increasingly steep premium for the higher end performance, thats true for essentially most products on earth.

Likewise a 560ti is more than 10% slower than a 6970 at pretty much standard resolutions, at high resolutions the gap just widens, why on earth should AMD drop the 2gb 6950 in line with 560ti pricing?

http://www.anandtech.com/show/4135/nvidias-geforce-gtx-560-ti-upsetting-the-250-market/5

Its almost 30% behind at high res, and 10-15% at lower res, and is only 10% cheaper than a 2gb 6950 that has double the memory.

As for unlocking, AMD haven't disabled this, 3rd party pcb's that are cheaper and the AIB's stopped you doing it. They want to sell fancy editions for higher margins, and thats more difficult when you can buy a cheaper card and unlock it from anyone. There were plenty around, like, 100k's of the unlockable cards, and you could still easily buy them ,4-5 months after release. The fairly simple answer is, if you're an enthusiast and want a new card, shortly after launch to get the most time before the new gen is almost always the optimum time to be buying a new gen card anyway, if you did that, unlockable card availability wasn't an issue.
 
rolypolyman said:
Yesterday 2 X 6870 was £249.98 :eek: bargain in my opinion though for the performance only 1Gb of memory is criminal. Amd\Nvidia really need to find a way to address both graphics cards memory(2x1Gb=2Gb) or these setups will cease to be attractive, if they aren't already.
Click to expand...

Here's a hint, on board memory bandwidth of 176gb/s on a 6970, pci-e 3, something these cards aren't compatible with yet, will only offer 32gb/s bandwidth. You can't use the memory across cards, it won't happen anytime soon, it will require a completely new interface between pci-e slots, and it will cost a LOT to implement, increasing the cost of every mobo you buy. Considering that cost would be increased for those without xfire/sli, which is still VERY small numbers of users, and all that happens is $10-15 is added to the cost of a higher memory graphics card, its not even close to worth it.
 
drunkenmaster said:
What are you talking about, a 6970 is not 3% faster than a 6950, clock for clock it is, both cards at stock, they aren't 3% apart, not even close. Likewise, you charge an increasingly steep premium for the higher end performance, thats true for essentially most products on earth.

Likewise a 560ti is more than 10% slower than a 6970 at pretty much standard resolutions, at high resolutions the gap just widens, why on earth should AMD drop the 2gb 6950 in line with 560ti pricing?

http://www.anandtech.com/show/4135/nvidias-geforce-gtx-560-ti-upsetting-the-250-market/5

Its almost 30% behind at high res, and 10-15% at lower res, and is only 10% cheaper than a 2gb 6950 that has double the memory.
Click to expand...
You are missing my point. 5850 and 6870 are only around £125~£130, and the 6950 2GB is at £200+, despite it is not hugely faster. 55%~60% extra in price for around 10~15% faster in speed and extra VRAM is a bit poor value and not getting the money's worth IMO. If we ignore the 1GB model of the GTX560Ti and 6950, the price grap between the 5850/6870 and 6950 2GB is £75~£100!

I'm not saying AMD should drop the 6950 2GB price to match GTX560Ti 1GB price...I was saying there shouldn't even be any reason for the existence of the 1GB model of those cards, and instead, both the GTX560Ti 2GB and the 6950 2GB should be priced around the £170~£190 price range, not £200+.
 
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I'm bored of the 6950 now...I was unlocking mine at christmas and now are bored with GFX cards in general.

We need new Gen really
 
If 2 Gb GTX 560s or 6950s were at the £180 mark, then I would have bought them.

They were both over £250 when the 1 Gb ones I got were £199 on launch, that would have been an extra £100 for 2 Gb Vram, which is definitely not worth it.

Plus the 1 Gb versions were much better built than the 2 Gb ones (MSI Twinfrozr or Gigabyte SOC 1 Gb both great overclockers, or Palit reference design 2 Gb which would have less chance to overclock and a much higher temperature).
 
drunkenmaster said:
Here's a hint, on board memory bandwidth of 176gb/s on a 6970, pci-e 3, something these cards aren't compatible with yet, will only offer 32gb/s bandwidth. You can't use the memory across cards, it won't happen anytime soon, it will require a completely new interface between pci-e slots, and it will cost a LOT to implement, increasing the cost of every mobo you buy. Considering that cost would be increased for those without xfire/sli, which is still VERY small numbers of users, and all that happens is $10-15 is added to the cost of a higher memory graphics card, its not even close to worth it.
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Thanks DM I confess I had no idea whether addressing all the memory on both cards was viable and I guess the point i was trying to make was that 2 X 6870 was a powerful combo but that power may be hindered by lack of memory and indeed if what you say is true(I dont doubt you)then yes its not cost effective.:)
 
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