AMD Radeon HD 6950 unlocked
speedster911t
Right off the assembly line
@ 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.
I agree with the op as not all cards can be unlocked only the reference designs from asus amd itself sapphire & other good known reputed companies cards can only be unlocked as non ref design's have custom made pcb's with slapped on custom design coolers & stufff like msi twin frozr II series have they are specifically the companies have disabled the additional cores by laser etching or cutting the shader part & reducing the mem voltage & core voltage for improved temperatures & they further add more power phases typically like 6+1 or 6+2 votage regulator modules vrm's than standard 4+1 or 5+1 found on reference design one's & so it makes the non ref design a completely diff card in itself in terms of design i m talking not it performance part,.but still the reference cards have a pretty good chance of unlocking the cores and sometimes gaining additional memory bandwidth by flashing the original bios of a older card to a newer one,.but again as i have seen the success rates are only 50-70 % for reference design owners & 10-30 % for the non reference ones,.i think th op was a real lucky guy as he had got a refernce design one of a reputed brand & got his card unlocked to a upgraded 6970 which is almost 3-5k costlier than the latter
so free perfomance for the guy @the same price cheers to u mate 
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Jaskanwar Singh
Aspiring Novelist
rchi when i press program, it says cant modify ROM.
Jaskanwar Singh
Aspiring Novelist
It has bios switch rchi.
OP
rchi84
In the zone
Hmm, in that case, maybe the current bios is write protected, to act as backup?
Turn off your PC, flip the bios switch to the other position, restart and try to flash it.
For me option 1 was writeable, so maybe, Sapphire flipped the order around. Try it. if it doesn't work on both bios, don't risk frying them by forcing a flash through command prompt..
Turn off your PC, flip the bios switch to the other position, restart and try to flash it.
For me option 1 was writeable, so maybe, Sapphire flipped the order around. Try it. if it doesn't work on both bios, don't risk frying them by forcing a flash through command prompt..
Jaskanwar Singh
Aspiring Novelist
rchi i think best will be to leave the card as it is currently