Unlock your ATI 6950 to a 6970 Thread

[easyrider]

*Do at your own risk - Mods*

Looks like the 6950 card CAN BE UNLOCKED to a Full 6970


I have done his myself from this

to this

Unlock the clock limitation in CCC too

You can keep track of the cards that have flashed here

for 128 extra shaders


From Windows (this is how I did the flash)

For the people who need to unlockrom and fail at command line:

- Unpack the Winflash download onto your desktop in a folder called "winflash"
- Save the 6970 BIOS in your Winflash folder and name it unlock.bin
- Click Start Button
- Type "cmd"
- Right click the entry and select "Run as Administrator"
- Black command prompt windows opens
- Type "cd %USERPROFILE%\desktop\winflash"
- Type "atiwinflash -unlockrom 0" <-- the 0 means first adapter, if you have multiple cards, physically uninstall all but the one you want to flash
- Type "atiwinflash -f -p 0 unlock.bin"
- It should complete the flashing process with a message saying something with "verified".


Automated Batch file flashing

Follow this link for info and this one to download all the files ready to go.

It works perfectly and even runs a backup of your original bios.

Big thumbs up to Techpowerup


EDIT: Updated info here

http://www.techpowerup.com/articles/overclocking/vidcard/159

We can see that enabling the shaders without any clock increases improves performance. Once the clock speeds are adjusted to match the HD 6970, the card effectively performs just as well as a full blown Radeon HD 6970.



Link to reference Bios here

Bios Tools here

Thanks W1zzard for your excellent Article

 

[easyrider]

Nice find easy

Do it, do it, do it !

kitch9 linked to it so thanks go to him. I just documented here for others.

 

[easyrider]

Juts remembered too. We have two Bios and the bios switch so really the risk is small

 

[easyrider]

I can't believe that AMD had no lasercutting going on. That's very nice of them.

 

[easyrider]

Seriously - this is sounding like I should cnacel my 6970 order and get a 6950 and 'simply' turn it into a 6970? Right?

Its up to you. I'm waiting a few days until more results come in of any issues this may cause to the cards before I flash mine.

TBH i'm getting stock 6970 pseeds when overclocking anyway. I am pleased with the 6950. If these do unlock without issue then that's great.

 

[easyrider]

Dude, your main flash can't be changed, just flick the switch n flash. If it fails flick the switch back and all will be back as it was.

No risk at all, compared to every other card on the market. If I had a 6950 instead of a 6970 it would have been done already.

People are saying to flash bios 1 as bios 2 is the backup bios.

 

[easyrider]

edit: but so far only one person seems to have done it so maybe pie in the sky...

Loads of people have done it over at Xtremesystemfourms

 

[easyrider]

Will somebody test this already?

Its working on some and not on others. I want to make sure it will work on mine before I do.


I'm going to clock my ram up to 1400 first I know it can do 900mhz on the core.

If all is well I'll flash.

 

[easyrider]

http://www.techpowerup.com/articles/overclocking/vidcard/159

 

[easyrider]

We can see that enabling the shaders without any clock increases improves performance. Once the clock speeds are adjusted to match the HD 6970, the card effectively performs just as well as a full blown Radeon HD 6970.

 

[easyrider]

I can't get the winflash to run

 

[easyrider]

How do I get the winflash thing to run?

win7 64bit

I'm ready to flash if i can get this to run

 

[easyrider]

winflash should work fine under 64-bit, i actually tested on 64-bit.
i just uploaded the winflash version i used to tpu, click the winflash link in the article and try again. it won't work over a network share in case you are trying that

Cheers W1zzard will give it a go

 

[easyrider]

Just tried winflash 2.0.1.13 and clicked on save and it hung my PC

It saved it but then I had to reset my pc to get back on

Just checked and it did save but it scaring me somewhat as to why it hung?

 

[easyrider]

I got a buuble message saying display driver has stopped working and has now recovered

Does everything look ok? It seems odd that it doesnt display the current bios...?

I'm about to load the 6970 bin file

 

[easyrider]

Ok I went for it it started and then a message appeared saying "could not erase rom"

I have the switch position in 1


EDIT: If you get an error like ID mismatch or Could not erase ROM, then you'll have to do some extra work in a command prompt: Run atiwinflash -unlockrom 0 followed by atiwinflash -f -p 0 bios.bin where bios.bin is the path and filename of the HD 6970 BIOS you downloaded.

Guess I'll have to do in DOS and make a Bootable USB

 

[easyrider]

isnt it suppose to be in position 2 before you can change the bios?

no

They are all flashing bios 1 over at extreme

 

[easyrider]

you can run the winflash unlock commands from a command prompt in windows

how?

 

[easyrider]

open a cmd window, navigate to the atiwinflash directory and type the commands

I'm crap at stuff like that

 

[easyrider]

Just tried making a bootable USB