How much of a performance boost for just unlocking the shaders? I have 2x 6950's myself.I have no idea why that guy jumped on you to revert back to 6950 bios, he was out of line in a thread dedicated to that very mod, but a number of people (me included) have shied away from using the full 6970 bios in favor of a modified 6950 bios with unlocked shaders. Apparently, this, along with the higher voltage and clock settings for core and memory, are really the only differences between the 6950 and 6970 bios. So many have found that going back to the 6950 bios, unlocking and bumping the voltage, and raising the clocks can work just as well as the 6970. Part of the problem with using the 6950 with a full fledged 6970 bios is that the memory chips just aren't up to spec of the 6970 ones, so the stock memory voltage could be too high for the 6950.
A lot of people with a single 6950 have seen great success with MSI afterburner by boosting voltage slightly and increasing the clocks to 900/1350 or even higher. Sadly, for those of us with a pair of cards in crossfire, this is not yet a possibility, from what I understand. At the current time, MSI doesn't support crossfire setups very well for this card, and it will not raise clock speeds to any value higher than those available from the Catalyst Overdrive settings (max of 840/1325). So if you're using a crossfire setup, you're kind of stuck with those settings as a max for right now.
The good news is that there is a performance boost from just unlocking the shaders, but it's not that big, to be honest.
Welcome to the forum.
CCC allows a minor overclock then right? Shouldn't that help on top of the shader unlock?