Official Poll: What caused your flashed 6950 permanent damage?

I created a poll here: URL Removed -Oldie
For you guys who have permanent damage to your 6950 cards after flashing them or modding your bios. If you guys could vote in over there, maybe we can start to find out the root cause of what's killing these cards. If I had to guess, I think it's the high memory speeds, or possibly some sort of memory timings in the 6970 bios. Thanks guys, and I know I linked to another forum, so don't flame me, It just seems more beneficial to have one big poll.

- Mike

It seems like the failure rate for these flashed cards is pretty low. I'm running on a 6950 flashed to a full stock 6970 without an issue to speak of.

I would say that its just part of the inherit risk of flashing a card with a non-standard bios to unlock previously locked parts of the hardware that didn't fully pass Q/A. I would just venture a guess that its likely just that for a percentage of cards that do unlock there will be those that fail soon afterward.

Maybe that's it, maybe not. It seems to be a growing problem in every 6950>6970 thread that I keep up with... I'm trying to help everyone figure it out collectively now so they can be informed. I don't want to see everyone end up with dead cards in 2 months if we can prevent it

why is this official ? is AMD doing it? some company contracted by AMD?

YAY! CAPS LOCK PARTY!!!!!!!!!!111ONEONE

Seriously, could it be memory voltage? Some people flashed a 6970 stock BIOS. If anyone can confirm that the 6970 has a higher memory voltage then the 6950, then maybe the 6950's memory can't handle such high voltage. IIRC it's a lesser grade of memory, rated for 5Gbps instead of 6Gbps.

EDIT: Curse my soul. I wrote 'then' instead of 'than'. A cardinal sin in my book.

Digital Viper-X- said:

why is this official ? is AMD doing it? some company contracted by AMD?

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I'm trying to make one unanimous poll / thread where everyone can discuss their card's failure. Flame my wording if you want, hopefully it will help out some people and save some cards.

XacTactX said:

YAY! CAPS LOCK PARTY!!!!!!!!!!111ONEONE

Seriously, could it be memory voltage? Some people flashed a 6970 stock BIOS. If anyone can confirm that the 6970 has a higher memory voltage then the 6950, then maybe the 6950's memory can't handle such high voltage. IIRC it's a lesser grade of memory, rated for 5Gbps instead of 6Gbps.

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Yeah, hopefully it can eventually get narrowed down to memory timings, or voltage, or mhz so we can figure out the best way to run these cards with the least amount of risk.

I'm about to get my 6950's in. Is there something people are doing that is more risky? There's two ways people are doing it right? One is flashing bios to 6970 and the other is just "unlocking" the shaders?

What is the safest measure to upgrade the 6950's?

Btw, they're XFX.

All caps like an AOL idiot trying to get attention. Reporting it so it can be edited.
The only permanent damage you can cause to the card would be shortening its life span because the chips were binned to begin with for a reason. Anyone with any experience in overclocking should know that you never jump clocks and voltages in one fell swoop. You gradually increase clocks along with voltage testing stability along the way.
What this flash does is overclock and overvolt the core/memory in one step. Any hardware tweaker with experience will tell you, that's a stupid thing to do. People are only getting lucky because AMD used the exact same PCB for both cards. Once the revision 2 boards come out unlocking will be a thing of the past.

arachn1d said:

I'm about to get my 6950's in. Is there something people are doing that is more risky? There's two ways people are doing it right? One is flashing bios to 6970 and the other is just "unlocking" the shaders?

What is the safest measure to upgrade the 6950's?

Btw, they're XFX.

Click to expand...

Yes, there are two ways. Most failures are coming from flashing the 6970 bios onto the 6950 card. Many believe its due to memory timings/voltage/clock speed. Your best bet is to use the script posted in the Techpowerup thread to modify your stock bios to enable all shaders then overclock your card where you want it. I would suggest for now keeping your memory at stock 6950 speeds though because the memory seems to be where the failures are coming in.

Even though I wasn't having any issues I decided to flash mine back to the original bios. Will wait for more information.

If you want to start a poll/discussion here fine, but don't post a link to another forum people have to sign up to use just to vote in some poll you made up.