Unlock your ATI 6950 to a 6970 Thread

kintarooe · 18 Nov 2011 at 00:01

Anyone with a ASUS EAH6950 DCII 2GB around that unlocked it with flashing to the EAH6970 DCII 2GB Bios instead of manually unlocking shaders only?

I did so and I am worried a little , so far its running well but I read a lot of people with problems and now I am into paranoia.

Might be better to stick to normal 6950 Bios and only unlocking shaders / overclocking ? :eek:

geordie12 · 18 Nov 2011 at 15:58

uh-oh....I think I've just managed to brick my new 6950.....I flashed the bios, now my system won't restart, I am just getting a click click noise and the systems is continually restarting

No switch on my card to go back to the original bios...double

NinetyOne · 18 Nov 2011 at 16:09

geordie12 said:
uh-oh....I think I've just managed to brick my new 6950.....I flashed the bios, now my system won't restart, I am just getting a click click noise and the systems is continually restarting

No switch on my card to go back to the original bios...double

That's why you shouldn't flash the bios. You should only unlock the shaders.

geordie12 · 18 Nov 2011 at 16:16

NinetyOne said:
That's why you shouldn't flash the bios. You should only unlock the shaders.

Yeah entirly my fault for not reading up enough before I did it, feeling like quite a pratt now.

Anyone know a way of getting it working? I've managed to put my old card back in and have moved the 6950 to a different PCIe slot and can see it enough to try flashing it. It seems to work, but when I swap back it just craps out again.

NinetyOne · 18 Nov 2011 at 16:21

geordie12 said:
Yeah entirly my fault for not reading up enough before I did it, feeling like quite a pratt now.

Anyone know a way of getting it working? I've managed to put my old card back in and have moved the 6950 to a different PCIe slot and can see it enough to try flashing it. It seems to work, but when I swap back it just craps out again.

Did you make a copy of your old bios?

geordie12 · 18 Nov 2011 at 16:22

yeah I have the ROM file from before I started

NinetyOne · 18 Nov 2011 at 16:44

geordie12 said:
yeah I have the ROM file from before I started

And it won't let you flash it back while it's in the other pci slot?

Lum · 18 Nov 2011 at 16:49

Stick another graphics card in, like an old PCI one, configure your system so that graphics card becomes the primary and is used for booting. There's usually an "Init graphics first" PCI/PEG (PCI Express Graphics) setting in the BIOS.

Boot into Windows or DOS, flash your old BIOS back.

geordie12 · 18 Nov 2011 at 17:06

Yeah it doesn't seem to be working, it says it's flashing, but once I turn off, swap the cards back round and restart I get the same issue of the clicking and the power cycle.

Windows does seem to see it though when it's in the second PCIe slot so I guess that's possitive!

kintarooe · 18 Nov 2011 at 21:40

gareth / easyrider still kickin' with your flashed bios ? Or did something happen in the meantime?

JamesM · 24 Nov 2011 at 09:12

Well I've got a strange issue again. As before, have got an MSI and Sapphire card. MSI card works fine and has unlocked easily.

The Sapphire card appears to have unlocked as it shows the extra shaders yet as soon as I try to play a game in crossfire I get horrible screen flicker, fuzzy bars going across the screen up and down. If I then make BF3 into a window the flicking goes away and it works happily on the one main card, the Sapphire one?

This happens to all games, Sapphire as my main card and MSI as my second, monitor plugged into my Sapphire.. Crossfire and I get the dreaded screen flicker, with it disabled it works fine?

Surely if the shaders were at fault then I'd get the same issue with the card running on it's own?

JamesM · 24 Nov 2011 at 12:16

JamesM said:
Well I've got a strange issue again. As before, have got an MSI and Sapphire card. MSI card works fine and has unlocked easily.

The Sapphire card appears to have unlocked as it shows the extra shaders yet as soon as I try to play a game in crossfire I get horrible screen flicker, fuzzy bars going across the screen up and down. If I then make BF3 into a window the flicking goes away and it works happily on the one main card, the Sapphire one?

This happens to all games, Sapphire as my main card and MSI as my second, monitor plugged into my Sapphire.. Crossfire and I get the dreaded screen flicker, with it disabled it works fine?

Surely if the shaders were at fault then I'd get the same issue with the card running on it's own?

And now after swapping the cards over so I'm using the MSI card as the main one, the Sapphire card works with unlocked shaders in crossfire?! :confused:

marky g · 1 Dec 2011 at 15:49

asus 6950 2058mb directcu11

ive got the 6950 asus 2gb direct cu11. can some explain how to flash it to 6970 and is it safe. i got i5 760. clocked to 3.6mhz

NinetyOne · 1 Dec 2011 at 17:17

marky g said:
ive got the 6950 asus 2gb direct cu11. can some explain how to flash it to 6970 and is it safe. i got i5 760. clocked to 3.6mhz

I wouldn't risk it with non reference cards, unless they've been tested a lot.

flynn353 · 11 Dec 2011 at 16:41

Anyone have any experience with upgrading the HIS ATI Radeon HD 6950 IceQ X PLUS Edition 2048MB card?

MonkeyMagic · 13 Dec 2011 at 09:29

Late to the party

Hi All,

I just wanted to post about the trawling I've done over the interwebs trying to find a current retail unlockable card. As I was late to the party this mean't reference cards were not an option.

After a lot of hunting I narrowed my choices to the following 4 HD 6950 2GB variants:

MSI Twin Frozr II (These allegedly unlock with a non-standard scripted method)
MSI Twin Frozr III (The later batches do unlock as demonstrated on this thread!)
Sapphire Dual Fan Edition (All SKUs of this type with the dual bios and switch have a chance of unlocking doesnt have to be the dirt 3 edition either)
Asus Direct CU II (Anecdotals that this unlocks)

I haven't included the Sapphire Toxic card as its hard to find at a decent price (most within a tenner of a retail 6970 atm).

In the end I got the Sapphire Dual Fan edition with BF3 and Deus Ex, unboxed it flicked a switch and stuck it in my PC, 1536 shaders...

Good luck all.

DarkHorizon472 · 17 Dec 2011 at 23:16

Just a quick question, it seems the gains from flashing to a 6970 are minimal but the gains from overclocking a 6950 are much better and easily reach 6970 performance.

Is that right :confused:

ElliottJames · 19 Dec 2011 at 18:54

How do I just unlock the shaders? Don't want to oc it.

NinetyOne · 19 Dec 2011 at 19:12

ElliottJames said:
How do I just unlock the shaders? Don't want to oc it.

You're asking how in a how to thread? Read OP.

ElliottJames · 19 Dec 2011 at 19:15

Oh sorry I got confused, I thought the thing overclocks it also to +20%. So If I just unlock shaders, I'm not increasing voltages or anything? And unlocking shaders will giv eme a significant performance increase?