AMD Radeon HD 6950 unlocked

[Gaurav Bhattacharjee]

First of all, this is an excellent write-up. I'll ask the mods (or maybe I'll ask ico) to make this post into a separate sticky thread for all who want to unlock additional shaders in their GPU's (provided their GPU's are unlockable) in general and specifically for those wanting to unlock a 6950 2GB into a 6970 2GB.

oh, and quick question. how do you modify a thread title after creating one?

I guess its only the mods and admins who can do that. But I maybe wrong.

 

[flamereaper]

the prices of your system is much cheaper than what is listed in the deltapage website. Did you bargain a lot?

 

[vickybat]

@ rchi84

Congrats mate for unlocking the card. So 6950 2gb's can still be unlocked. That is really good and offers awesome vfm.

 

[skeletor]

Congrats rchi84.

I can rename the thread for you. Just tell me what should I rename it to. I've renamed it to "AMD Radeon HD 6950 unlock"

@ rchi84

Congrats mate for unlocking the card. So 6950 2gb's can still be unlocked. That is really good and offers awesome vfm.

yup! People in the USA are still getting their HD 6950 2GB unlocked with more than 90% success rate!

 

[Gaurav Bhattacharjee]

Congrats rchi84.

I can rename the thread for you. Just tell me what should I rename it to. I've renamed it to "AMD Radeon HD 6950 unlock"

Better be "Radeon HD 6950 Unlocked"??
Also what about the sticky post I asked??

yup! People in the USA are still getting their HD 6950 2GB unlocked with more than 90% success rate!

People in Europe are also getting the same thing.

 

[Joker]

congratulations rchi84!!!

 

[asingh]

Saw this thread now. Good work. RBE is cool. Had used it once to flash better fan profiles for my GPU BIOS'....' Best is it let's you update the BIOS as a file (on your HDD) and you can try the settings using Rivatuner before the flash.

 

[blademast3r]

Congrats on the unlock.. but a word of caution.. Some unlocks are ending up with fried memory chips as the memory on the 6950 and 6970 are different.. there was a volt modded bios to reduce memory vcore to negate the effect

 

[Jaskanwar Singh]

congrats rchi

 

[rchi84]

@ blademast3r yeah, flashing the 6950 with a 6970 bios is dangerous. But the method I used is very safe, as it uses the same bios as the one 6950 ships with, and only unlocks the shaders, without touching the volts

Thanks guys. From what I can tell, any reference 2 Gb card has a good shot of unlocking the shaders. whether your card can run at 6970 clocks is entirely down to luck. Reference cards are 2 GB, with the standard cooler on the right side of the card, and has the dual bios chip.

So if you go for a model with custom cooling, like the MSI Twin Frozr II, then you wont be able to unlock the shaders as they are laser cut. The same goes for the newer revisions which have the cooler fan in the center.

And the additional shaders by themselves won't make a huge difference, unless accompanied by an overclock, but like I said earlier, as of now there are few games that will make this card sweat at 1920x1080.

 

[vickybat]

^^ Yeah right. Its a pretty powerful card at stock. Enjoy fullhd gaming man.

Will you crossfire in future?

@ gaurav

Buddy we shouldn't make this thread "sticky" cause with the advent of next gen architecture gpu's, people will eventually lose interest and that too rapidly. We can point this thread to anybody querying to unlock a reference 6950 2gb in TDF.

 

[vizkid2005]

Congrats dude !!!

 

[topgear]

Congrats rchi84

BTW, is there any temp idle/load difference ??

 

[Gaurav Bhattacharjee]

@ gaurav

Buddy we shouldn't make this thread "sticky" cause with the advent of next gen architecture gpu's, people will eventually lose interest and that too rapidly. We can point this thread to anybody querying to unlock a reference 6950 2gb in TDF.

Okay.

But you have to agree his write-up was excellent...I was only considering to see that post only as a separate sticky closed thread titled "How To Unlock Your Unlockable GPU".

 

[vickybat]

^^ Ya i do agree on that. His write-up was very clear and easy to follow.

 

[rchi84]

well guys, just to give a quick update, I've been tweaking away with Afterburner.

On stock volts (1.1V) I am able to match the stock 6970 clocks of 880/1375.

the only issue is that it isn't furmark stable BUT (get this), every other benchie like Vantage, 11, Unigine and all my games run well enough as long as powertune is set at +20%.

with a fan profile set at 70% on load, i get around 65 Degrees and the card idles around 40. Room temps are around 34 degrees so I am quite happy.

Back to gaming at 6950 clocks though its nice to know there's more under the hood.

 

[vickybat]

^^ Thats nice buddy. Can you post some gamebenchmarks in fullhd? If possible crysis2.

That will be really helpful and we can compare them with a stock 6970.

 

[rchi84]

Hi guys

Ran some benchmarks. Vantage for some reason, doesn't like the OC and actually gives my card a lower score lol.

For 3d Mark 11, on stock 6950 clocks, I get a score around 4700 on performance preset. The thing holding my scores down, i suspect is my i5 2400 CPU.

On 6970 clocks, my score improves to 5100.

The problem is that I am running on catalyst 11.3 which futuremark hasn't approved yet, so i only get text results online.

ran the crysis benchmark. settings were 1920x1080, 8xAA, DX 10.

2 years ago, my friend's pc died when we tried this

this time, on stock 6950 clocks, i was getting around 37 FPS. On 6970 clocks, I was getting around 42 FPS.

I wish i had the money to buy crysis 2, but DX9 only is a major no-no

so yeah, as weird as it sounds, i might actually be running into CPU bottlenecks or maybe my card doesn't perform all that spectacularly when OCd. I'm sticking with stock clocks for now.

pretty happy either way

 

[Jaskanwar Singh]

rchi here they say -*www.techpowerup.com/articles/overclocking/vidcard/159

Above method is only for 2 GB HD 6950 reference design cards. If you have a custom design or 1 GB card, then use RBE to modify your existing BIOS. Save the BIOS from your card, load it into RBE, enable the shader unlock option on the last tab, then flash that modified BIOS to the card instead of the one downloaded from this page.

so can the 1GB ones be unlocked too.

 

[rchi84]

Hi Jas.

From what I've read so far, MSI 1GB 6950s have been unlocked, while other models haven't.

Plus, I think with the 1GB cards, chances of unlocking are around 50%, while with a reference 2 GB card, i would say it's 90% (except for the Twin Frozr and the newer models with a central fan).

Again, it depends on a case by case basis. Some people might be unlucky enough to get a card with the shaders laser cut and so on