Flashing a 6950 to 6970 "safely"

K

Kurak

Limp Gawd
Joined
Nov 19, 2003
Messages
485
Hey guys. I have a 2gb Radeon 6950 that I'd like to attempt flashing to 6970/overclocking. The brand is HIS.

Although there is definitely not guarantee that it will work, the card may, in fact, meet the criteria. Is there any way to attempt this and have it be reversible, should the mod not work? I've done some googling but most of the guides are relatively dated.

Thanks.
 
Just save a copy of your original bios to flash back to if it's unstable. If you have a reference card with the blower style fan, you should have a dual bios switch, so you really can't screw it up. But only one of the bios can be flashed, the other is locked I believe.

I only unlocked the shaders on my 6950s, but they've always been very stable. I've not had any interest in pushing their clocks higher.
 
It's better to unlock the extra shaders on the 6950 if possible rather than flashing to a full 6970. The 6970 has different specs (especially higher voltages on the vRAM) which was correlated with higher hardware failure rates. As mentioned, if you have a dual BIOS switch, there's little risk involved.
 
^--this

the 6970 uses different memory and controller.

If you flash a 6970 bios on a 6950, it will use different timings and coulds shorten the life of your card and/or effect memory efficiency.

Just unlock the shaders with RBE and call it a day.
 
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