6950 Owners: Was Your Unlock Successful?

Were You Able to Successfully Unlock Your Radeon HD 6950 GPU?

  • Yes, my R6950 did unlock.

    Votes: 278 86.1%

  • No, my Asus R6950 did not unlock.

    Votes: 5 1.5%

  • No, my Diamond R6950 did not unlock.

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • No, my Gigabyte R6950 did not unlock.

    Votes: 1 0.3%

  • No, my HIS R6950 did not unlock.

    Votes: 2 0.6%

  • No, my MSI R6950 did not unlock.

    Votes: 5 1.5%

  • No, my PowerColor R6950 did not unlock.

    Votes: 7 2.2%

  • No, my Sapphire R6950 did not unlock.

    Votes: 15 4.6%

  • No, my VisionTek R6950 did not unlock.

    Votes: 1 0.3%

  • No, my XFX R6950 did not unlock.

    Votes: 9 2.8%
  • Total voters
    323
I flashed my sapphire to the 6950 unlocked bios, not [H] enough just yet to go the whole 6970 route. ;-(
I do have a question though, what are overclocks looking like with these cards in general versus opened shaders versus the 6970 flash? Should there be a new thread for that? I use AB for fan control at the moment (32 C at idle and so far no issues during load) but will begin tinkering when the volt control arrives. My 2nd card arrives tomorrow. I'm moving from cfx 5770's and so far I have in Vantage about 200 points to go to meet best score and heaven 2.1 is already ahead of the 5770's so obviously the second card will rock my world!
 
FranDaMan,

nice man. I went to 1 6950 flashed to a 6970 from crossfire 5770 setup. Getting two of 6950 are going to rock your world for sure. I hope you enjoy them!
 
I tried to flash my XFX 6950 and got a subsystemids mismatch in atiwinflash. Ran in an elevated CMD prompt and worked great, unlocked to 6970 and ran stable.
 
Second card arrived today. Can't vote again in the poll for the second card but it is running the unlocked 6950 bios. Running my AB profile for 865/1320 for gaming with a fan curve of course. Crossfire later tonight!
 
FranDaMan said:
Second card arrived today. Can't vote again in the poll for the second card but it is running the unlocked 6950 bios. Running my AB profile for 865/1320 for gaming with a fan curve of course. Crossfire later tonight!
Click to expand...

If you decide not to unlock them, I just want to emphasize that you're not missing out on much. A 6950 is clocked at 800/1250 compared to 880/1375, which is a 10% increase in clocks. Unlocking the shaders is only a 9% increase in shading power, so if you decide to overclock and not unlock, you're still getting most of a 6970. Alternatively, just overclock the core to 950, and you have stock 6970 performance. No big deal. And IIRC your cards are XFX, they cover overclocking, not unlocking shaders. That may be another reason to not unlock.

Congrats on getting those beasts, you're gonna have a blast either way :).
 
Up and running in crossfire! No time to really test much but I did run vantage and 3Dmark11. My Heaven 2.1 is now at 2268 and 90FPS. My best with the 5770's was 1050 and 41.7 fps. Vantage went from 17034 on CAT 10.12 (best run ever on these cards came on the last drivers I'll use on them) to 21172 on the 6950's. 3DMark exposes an issue I have in that I have to reduce the CPU to 3.4 from 3.6 or it won't finish the run with any card. So I'm getting 6897 there compared to 5030.

My main games to date have been the unreal series and not much else. I do have mass effect2,left 4 dead2 and Crysis Maximum collection. So, I'm off to load them up and see what I can do.
 
Got the MSI 6950 in today from Amazon. Unlocked Perfectly.
I went to Nvidia because of the 6870 10.10 fail, but so far I'm more than satisfied with the 6950, oops I mean 6970 :p.
 
I unlocked using a modified Asus 6950 bios tonight, may try the full 6970 once people figure out what exactly is causing the physical memory damage on some cards with a 6970 bios.

Still, Asus is nice because you can adjust voltage in smartdoctor. Currently running 925mhz at the stock 6970 voltage of 1.17 and stock 6950 memory speeds.
 
used the 6950 bios hack tool thingie(not a true 6970 bios) and works fine. Was afraid of damaged ram so I didn't use the 6970.

Memory overclocks fine to 1325 and core to 840. Using 49% fan speed cause anything above that causes a rattle.

So far very very pleased with my cheapo almost 6970.
 
My MSI and XFX brand unlocked successfully. Though it did not unlock the easy way but if you read the "extra work" part on the techpowerup article then you know what Im talking about. Otherwise cards are running perfect.
 
my HIS rocks with shader unlocked 6950 bios with 6950 volts at 900/1400
 
Mine arrives tomorrow. I will try to unlock immediately after getting it. From what I have read, 100% should be unlockable. The people who could not unlock probably did something wrong.
 
Sapphire 6950 flashed to 6970 working fine, heavily stress tested, no artifacts.. At full load hangs around 49c @ 40% fan
 
Got my MSI 6950 yesterday. I did the shader unlock by modding the MSI bios and have overclocked to 840/1325. I played some BC2 and ran a few tests, so far so good. Under FurMark, it gets to 83C with the stock fan setting after about 10 minutes.
 
Second card unlocked fine and so far is completely stable at 900/1400. Haven't tried to go higher, doubt I will for now.

Plan to put my build together tomorrow and run them both unlocked at 900/1400. I like nice even numbers :).
 
This is taken form techpowerup. I was unable to flash mine till I used this command prompt method. That is at the bottom.

Original thread

I will describe the method for flashing from within Windows, which is safe enough on these cards because of the dual BIOS feature that enables easy recovery.

1. Grab ATI Winflash from here (32 & 64-bit).
2. Download HD 6970 BIOS. The Sapphire one I linked to will work on all reference design cards from any vendor.
3. Make sure the BIOS switch on the card is set to the 1 position (pictured further down if you don't know where it is).
4. Run ATI Winflash, click Save to save your BIOS, so you have a backup in case something goes wrong.
5. Load the HD 6970 BIOS into Winflash by clicking Load Image, followed by Program.
6. Let the flashing process complete and reboot your system.
7. Check the shader count using GPU-Z, it should show 1536. Make sure you use version 0.5.0 or newer, the official 0.4.9 version does not support HD 6900 Series properly. If you see a shader count of 1600, your GPU-Z version is outdated.
8. To ensure maximized performance open Catalyst Control Center, go to the Overdrive tab and set the PowerTune slider to the +20% setting. The "Testing" section of this article has more data on that.
9. Check stability in Windows desktop applications and games.


If you get an error like ID mismatch or Could not erase ROM, then you'll have to do some extra work in a Windows command prompt (or DOS): Run atiwinflash -unlockrom 0 followed by atiwinflash -f -p 0 bios.bin where bios.bin is the path and filename of the HD 6970 BIOS you downloaded.
Click to expand...

I navigated to my folder for atiwinflash and the new bios. I typed in atiwinflash -unlockrom 0 (then i hit enter), I then typed atiwinflash -f -p 0 xfx.bin (then hit enter). It flashed it immediately, then I rebooted and presto chango, I just got a 6970 upgrade free.
 
Crucible1001 said:
I navigated to my folder for atiwinflash and the new bios. I typed in atiwinflash -unlockrom 0 (then i hit enter), I then typed atiwinflash -f -p 0 xfx.bin (then hit enter).
Click to expand...

I had to use this method as well for my MSI. I tried using the gui first and my machine essentially froze and went to black screen. If I moved the mouse, a small part of the screen would "wake up" briefly after several minutes. I thought I trashed my card for a few minutes there :) I had to do a hard reset but it rebooted ok.
 
Wow. The results here are pretty fantastic. This may be the route I take to upgrade from my GTX260. 6970 by way of modded 6950 is the closest I can seem to get to 2x GTX260 performance without spending stupid amounts of money.
 
Just unlocked the shaders on my Diamond 6950, pretty straightforward, didn't nother with flashing a 6970 as at the end of someof these threads people are saying there is artifacting on several cards (ones that were ok to begin with). Will probably overclock it some in CCC, good enough for me : )
 
Yeah how is stability under a full load benchmark like MSI Afterburner, or Furmark, or Unigine 2.1?

I am thinking of getting a 6950 and flashing it to 70 to go with my 2 true 70s in a 3x crossfire setup for max eyefinity performance.

thanks!
 
Even though I wasn't having any issues I decided to flash mine back to the original bios. Will wait for more information.
 
Flashed both my asus 6950s to the asus unlocked shader 6950 bios. Only running shaders unlocked and core clock at 840 for right now. Things seem to be ok so far. Couple hours worth of gaming in.
 
kcjay said:
Flashed both my asus 6950s to the asus unlocked shader 6950 bios. Only running shaders unlocked and core clock at 840 for right now. Things seem to be ok so far. Couple hours worth of gaming in.
Click to expand...

Good job. The key is to take it slow. When I flashed mine I did all kinds of crazy tests and overclocks on it.
 
Flashed two XFX 6950s with the shader unlocked bios (not the 6970 bios). Everything seems to be working fine; both cards are running at 840/1325.
 
unlocked sapphire 6950 shaders with asus bios, was running 6970 clocks, now running catalyst max clocks for 6950 840/1325
 
Got my xfx unlocked. Ran 1 benchmark at 6970 settings and was ok. Played Blackops, hard locked. I reduced to 850/1250 and all is ok. The ram is only rated for 1250 I believe, running it at 1375 like the 6970 is prob causing the artifact problems and damaging the ram. I believe people were trashing their 4xxx series cards by running the ram too high also.
 
dccmadams said:
Got my xfx unlocked. Ran 1 benchmark at 6970 settings and was ok. Played Blackops, hard locked. I reduced to 850/1250 and all is ok. The ram is only rated for 1250 I believe, running it at 1375 like the 6970 is prob causing the artifact problems and damaging the ram. I believe people were trashing their 4xxx series cards by running the ram too high also.
Click to expand...

not just the speed, i believe the 6970 ram runs at higher voltages to which doing the bios flash increases and thats what damaging ram. I just did the shader unlock and got my ram at 1365 with stock voltages and no problems at all (1375 did cause artifacts for me but no lock ups)
 
My MSI 6950 was showing artifacts on DESKTOP using the Sapphire 6970 BIOS, even after +20 power and dropping memory and GPU back to base clocks. 6950 modded BIOS seems perfectly fine, even in 3d.

I can only guess the card didn't like the extra voltage.
 
I bought a second 6950. I am going to keep them at stock bios until I get more information.

Currently I have played about 30 hours of games with the card already at 6970 speeds. Recently I lowered memory to 1275. I never had a single hiccup, but I don't want to break my new cards.
 
Crucible1001 said:
I bought a second 6950. I am going to keep them at stock bios until I get more information.

Currently I have played about 30 hours of games with the card already at 6970 speeds. Recently I lowered memory to 1275. I never had a single hiccup, but I don't want to break my new cards.
Click to expand...

How are you bypassing the CCC OC limits in XFire? I thought that everyone was getting immediate BSOD if they tried to OC beyond the limits in XFire mode, regardless of whether they used TriX or Afterburner.

That's certainly what happened to me when I flashed to shader-unlocked-only BIOS. (Didn't try before that.)
 
Matrices said:
How are you bypassing the CCC OC limits in XFire? I thought that everyone was getting immediate BSOD if they tried to OC beyond the limits in XFire mode, regardless of whether they used TriX or Afterburner.
Click to expand...

+1 to that.
 
Sorry for the confusion, but I don't have the second card yet. It will be here in a Tuesday from Newegg.
 
dccmadams said:
Got my xfx unlocked. Ran 1 benchmark at 6970 settings and was ok. Played Blackops, hard locked. I reduced to 850/1250 and all is ok. The ram is only rated for 1250 I believe, running it at 1375 like the 6970 is prob causing the artifact problems and damaging the ram. I believe people were trashing their 4xxx series cards by running the ram too high also.
Click to expand...

That was also very early GDDR5. After a couple of month you didn't hear about the degraded memory and I haven't really heard about it on any card since. As a mass problem at least.

That said I had my card flashed with a 6970 bios for a couple of weeks now and it ran fine but I just flashed it to a modded 6950 just to be on the safe side. The bios is made for that card.
 
I was using the 6970 bios, but have gone back to the 6950 bios with shaders unlocked, and CCC overclock of 840/1250 +20% settings. I used gpu-z to monitor volts and temps. Was hitting the 1.17v and 83c max temp on gpu #3 temp, which was the highest, with the 6970 bios. With current 6950 bios setup, 1.10v is max and 68C was the max temp I saw. My 3dmark11 scores dropped 300 points, but I feel better about my cards health. Fan was left on auto for all tests.
 
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