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Unlock your ATI 6950 to a 6970 Thread

I've been waiting ages to get admin activated to repost this to you guys:

A guy on techpowerup made a batch script which modifies your stock 6950 bios file to unlock the shader cores but keeps all clocks and voltages identical, and vram timings too .

http://www.techpowerup.com/wizzard/Mod_BIOS_HD_6950.zip

Unzip the script, save your bios file to the folder where you put the script as "original.bin". Run the script and you should get a "modded.bin" file, then just flash it as normal and reboot.

This unlocks the locked cores but keeps the 6950 clocks, the 6950 voltages, and most importantly the 6950 vram timings. I used a 6970 bios before and it worked fine but have been using this method. Was solid in heaven and i just plowed through a few games of bc2 with it.
 
Tlan said:
I've been waiting ages to get admin activated to repost this to you guys:

A guy on techpowerup made a batch script which modifies your stock 6950 bios file to unlock the shader cores but keeps all clocks and voltages identical, and vram timings too .

http://www.techpowerup.com/wizzard/Mod_BIOS_HD_6950.zip

Unzip the script, save your bios file to the folder where you put the script as "original.bin". Run the script and you should get a "modded.bin" file, then just flash it as normal and reboot.

This unlocks the locked cores but keeps the 6950 clocks, the 6950 voltages, and most importantly the 6950 vram timings. I used a 6970 bios before and it worked fine but have been using this method. Was solid in heaven and i just plowed through a few games of bc2 with it.
Click to expand...

First of all welcome to OCUK!
Secondly, nice find there. Does this new bios keep the card as a 6950?
The reason I ask is because CCC has crap overclocking limits for a 6950 and a nicer limit for the 6970. I know MSI afterburner will solve this issue, but why use it when you don't have to? :)
I will read around this bios to check it is what it says it is (no reason it shouldn't be) and flash my HIS 6950 to it.

This bios is important as when running +20% power I occasionaly get green pixels and lines all over the screen with the 6870 bios, yet never at 0% power.
The bios does not up the power level limits, so the 6850 power limit is the same as a flashed 6950 power limit (currently anyway!).
 
Yes it does keep it as a 6950 in the eyes of the drivers, with the overclocking limits and the powertune limit. However with unofficial overclocking in msi afterburner it's not too much of a problem.

But it does unlock the shader cores and they are fully functional with the modded bios.

It retains the 6950 stock clocks, 6950 stock voltages and the 6950 vram timings. It is still a 6950 bios which has been modded. Not a stock 6970 bios.

When radeon bios editor is updated to support the 6900 series you should be able to overvolt and overclock with no problem whilst keeping the 6950 vram timings which is what appears to be causing a lot of the artifacting.
 
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Tlan said:
Yes it does keep it as a 6950 in the eyes of the drivers, with the overclocking limits and the powertune limit. However with unofficial overclocking in msi afterburner it's not too much of a problem.

But it does unlock the shader cores and they are fully functional with the modded bios.

It retains the 6950 stock clocks, 6950 stock voltages and the 6950 vram timings.

When radeon bios editor is updated to support the 6900 series you should be able to overvolt and overclock with no problem whilst keeping the 6950 vram timings which is what appears to be causing a lot of the artifacting.
Click to expand...

Awesome news:)
I wouldn't mind having a go at this kind of stuff at some point in the future:)
I am assuming the Radeon Bios Editor is a completely unofficial program?
Are all the unlocked 6950 bios's around with stock clocks and voltages?

Give it a few days and I bet we shall see a 6970 bios with 6950 timings and a nice gpu voltage.
 
I think my second HIS 6950 is borked! reflashed back to 6950 from 6970 and all is good, but my son told me about some lockups and had to use ctrl-alt-del to restart. Also, I've setup these two cards in Xfire and I'm getting no increase in performance in anything other than unigine which gives me a score a tad over 2000 so it would appear thats working ok, BUT looking in CCC the second card is showing no core or gpu clock speeds, no temps, just fan speed, whereas the first gpu is showing all relevant data.
cpu-z also shows no second card fitted at all and gpu-z shows the second one occasionally!
I'm about to swap the card positions over and see if the prob is the card or mobo, but to me, its looking like rma time unfortunately.
 
Just ran Heaven with the 6950 bios with unlocked shaders and all is ok.
I am only running a small overclock at the moment of 840mhz core and 1325mhz memory (basically I am at the max CCC will allow for now).
I am running +20% and had no issues, however the 6970 bios only went fubar once out of 4-5 runs, so time will tell if this bios is genuinely better, but I do believe it is.
 
mglover070588 said:
Awesome news:)
I wouldn't mind having a go at this kind of stuff at some point in the future:)
I am assuming the Radeon Bios Editor is a completely unofficial program?
Are all the unlocked 6950 bios's around with stock clocks and voltages?

Give it a few days and I bet we shall see a 6970 bios with 6950 timings and a nice gpu voltage.
Click to expand...

Well for now, we've got one that gives the extra shader cores without artifacting off vram timings that are designed for different ram chips.

And yes in a few days there should be a 6970 bios out with edited timings. Radeon bios editor is completely unofficial yes but i've used it for editing bioses on cards before and it's generally pretty good. Combined with the 6900 series being practically unbrickable, this might be my favourite series to bios experiment on yet :)
 
Tlan said:
I've been waiting ages to get admin activated to repost this to you guys:

A guy on techpowerup made a batch script which modifies your stock 6950 bios file to unlock the shader cores but keeps all clocks and voltages identical, and vram timings too .

http://www.techpowerup.com/wizzard/Mod_BIOS_HD_6950.zip

Unzip the script, save your bios file to the folder where you put the script as "original.bin". Run the script and you should get a "modded.bin" file, then just flash it as normal and reboot.

This unlocks the locked cores but keeps the 6950 clocks, the 6950 voltages, and most importantly the 6950 vram timings. I used a 6970 bios before and it worked fine but have been using this method. Was solid in heaven and i just plowed through a few games of bc2 with it.
Click to expand...

Fixed my cards.
had artifacts but with this I am able to run benches at 870mhz which shows no artifacts at all, both cards are now working with shaders unlocked.
:D
now I need a voltage tool to see if that works for more power and speed.
 
I have my new Sapphire card unlocked with the default GPU and Memory speeds for a 6970 plus 20% Power Control and Manual Fan control set to 45% as the auto never went over 30% and the GPU was hitting 90C in Furmark, currently at 80C in Furmark, no artifacts.
 
My understanding;

You can unlock the shaders no problem using a 6970 bios, no one has registered a core that will not take this. 5% performance right there.

It will set the memory to 6970 speed and timings. The memory is different on the 6950/6970; this and guaranteed 6970 specs along with higher binned chips is what you pay for when buying a 'true' 6970. People whose 6950s artefact and crash, which is not unusual on forums, report that loading a 6950 bios modified to unlock shader count, but leaving the memory speed and timings, solves the problem. This makes sense as artefacting is usually a memory issue.

A 6950 will bench if the bios if modified correctly the same as a 6970 BUT ONLY if the 6950's memory overclocks decently (ballpark it will need to be in the top 70% of 6950 memory overclockers; good odds). Pcbs of both look the same; in theory same physical core and same voltage regulation should mean same overclock with very minor advantage to average 6970 overclocks supposedly through binning. Custom 6850 bioses will emerge to best use the performance on the card.

My opinion (just my opinion dont care to argue it as I may be wrong); AMD were wrong-footed by the 580/570 launch so they pulled a marketing ploy...they took the 6970 cores they knew they wouldn’t sell and would damage their brand if released in comparison, and just sold them as a lower end part. There were stories once the delay in first release was called that 6950 amounts went up drastically. It is going to be a staple this forum for a while that the 6950 is <the> card to get. It you cant price a premium on your chips best sell in bulk, retain market share and make NVidia suffer.

What have they lost? From a company who are clearly used to low profit tactics this to me makes sense and as a refresh R&D is far less.
 
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pieman109 said:
I think my second HIS 6950 is borked! reflashed back to 6950 from 6970 and all is good, but my son told me about some lockups and had to use ctrl-alt-del to restart. Also, I've setup these two cards in Xfire and I'm getting no increase in performance in anything other than unigine which gives me a score a tad over 2000 so it would appear thats working ok, BUT looking in CCC the second card is showing no core or gpu clock speeds, no temps, just fan speed, whereas the first gpu is showing all relevant data.
cpu-z also shows no second card fitted at all and gpu-z shows the second one occasionally!
I'm about to swap the card positions over and see if the prob is the card or mobo, but to me, its looking like rma time unfortunately.
Click to expand...



it will be like this if no 3d application is being used, fire up a 3d app with CCC on and you'l see the 2nd card kick in. as for the lock-ups.. how are your temps using CF? my 5870's used to crash quite a bit untill i improved the airflow in my case
 
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i'm sticking to the asus 6970 bios because i can clock the memory to 1450mhz and core 940mhz.

on the 6950 bios i can only clock the memory to 1350mhz and core 890mhz without crashing.
 
I'm going to stick to a 6970 bios for now as had no issues so far on any power settings.

I'm not going to overclock it any further though as I'm not meant to be running it at theses clock speeds and don't want to push it further!

What are the benefits of using the Asus bios compared to the onr I'm using which is Sapphire?
 
cainer said:
it will be like this if no 3d application is being used, fire up a 3d app with CCC on and you'l see the 2nd card kick in. as for the lock-ups.. how are your temps using CF? my 5870's used to crash quite a bit untill i improved the airflow in my case
Click to expand...

Yep I can confirm that, did some investigating and found that to be true. I've run unigine "heaven" a good few times and temps appear to never go over 70c on either card although one is about 5c-6c higher than he other but thats not surprising. Scores also appear to be right on money too with scores of around 2150 marks, min fps 55.6, etc so Xfire is working. 3dmark 11 gives me 6700ish as well so that seems to be in the ballpark too although I'm not sure what CCC settings to use (stock or everything for performance) but with a bit work I reckon I can easily get that score up.
Now the cruncher, having just reinstalled win 7 the only games I've got installed are "crysis" and "crysis warhead" and I safley say both of these games show NO appreciable increase in performance at all, in fact I'd say the original crysis gives slightly worse fps when in Xfire:confused: I don't know wether this down to the game not scaling at all (but I would've expected some increase) but to lose fps is just plain daft.
If this situation is normal and game scaling doesn't appreciably increase, I can't see a point of having Xfire, I bought the second card for gaming as don't play benchies all day, I run benchies to check performance and then never touch 'em again for months.
 
Tlan said:
I've been waiting ages to get admin activated to repost this to you guys:

A guy on techpowerup made a batch script which modifies your stock 6950 bios file to unlock the shader cores but keeps all clocks and voltages identical, and vram timings too .

http://www.techpowerup.com/wizzard/Mod_BIOS_HD_6950.zip

Unzip the script, save your bios file to the folder where you put the script as "original.bin". Run the script and you should get a "modded.bin" file, then just flash it as normal and reboot.

This unlocks the locked cores but keeps the 6950 clocks, the 6950 voltages, and most importantly the 6950 vram timings. I used a 6970 bios before and it worked fine but have been using this method. Was solid in heaven and i just plowed through a few games of bc2 with it.
Click to expand...

Can this bios that doesn't effect the Vram timings be used with techpowerup "noob" flashing package? I've been using this utility with no probs and its real easy to use. If so, can you post a noobs guide as to how to use it? I'm assuming, probably incorrectly, that you could transfer the new bios into winflash and then run the utility so that it instals the bios that leaves the original 6950 clocks and Vram timings. I'm hoping that the new 6970 Vram timings are the root of me probs.
Cheers
 
You mean the batch script? I'm not sure.

But i do know for a fact using atiwinflash will work, just follow the instructions in the OP of this thread and just use your modded.bin file instead.
 
Just collected my HIS 6950 and look forward to flashing it when I get home from work tonight.

If it works, I'll be one happy bunny.
 
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