So I flashed my 6850 with a 6870 bios...

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novadaemon

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Aug 24, 2006
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I flashed my Gigabyte 6850 with the Gigabyte 6870 bios. Everything went just as expected. :)

Benefits include:
No shader's unlocked or anything, but now I have my default clocks at 6870 level.
My AMD overdrive limit has been raised to 1000/1250.
My fans spin slower at 20% during idle vs 75% with no real adverse effect on idle temps.
I get a nice .025v boost to core voltage.
Afterburner now lets me mod my voltage, where for some reasons it wouldn't let me with my 6850 bios. (no clue why on that one)

There are probably a few more advantages, but that's all that I can think of off the top of my head. For warranty purposes I can always flash back unless the card totally dies.

Flashing to the 6870 really closed the gap between the two cards as the extra 160 shaders and 8 texture units constitute only a theoretical 14% performance improvement. The actual benefit is lower.
 
novadaemon said:
That's pretty awesome. Mine had the 850/1200 limit, so this was nice for me at least.
Click to expand...

Yeah some cards allow higher and some don't, must be the bios from the cards. I was thinking something was wrong when I got my card and had those limits right from the get go. Now instead of being stumped, I am happy. ;)
 
Just wondering, any source for the 6870 bios/tutorial for flashing? Or is that illegal, and you need to own a 6870 to have access to its bios?

I did some quick googling and only found one guru3d article that said that flasing is not possible. Seeing as how I may be getting this card, I'm very interested.
 
Do you have the specifics of which 6850 you have, and which 6870 bios you replaced it with? Have any quirks shown up in the long term?
 
I tried the 6870 driver on a recently purchased 6850OC but no luck. As soon as a try to play anything or do a benchmark PC freezes. Had to revert back to the 6850OC BIOS and running stable at 850/1120.

Has anyone had any better luck.
 
What is the point? Your card can overclock to those speeds without the need for a vga bios from a different card. Seems like the safer route to me.
 
I just unlocked the shaders on my MSI Twin Frozr II the other day. I didnt use a bios, i used a script to mod my original bios, and left the rest stock for me to tweak myself. As I dont have a backup bios switch.
 
novadaemon said:
For warranty purposes I can always flash back unless the card totally dies.
Click to expand...

Best part about this post... I lol'd out loud. :p


Wait for it...


You better hope for early artifacting OP... ;) But, then again, this thread is old, and you seem to have gone Nvidia :p
 
Stupid_Newbie said:
I just unlocked the shaders on my MSI Twin Frozr II the other day. I didnt use a bios, i used a script to mod my original bios, and left the rest stock for me to tweak myself. As I dont have a backup bios switch.
Click to expand...

What did you use to modify that BIOS? Maybe same can be done for my Gigabyte 6850OC
 
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