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Which to get - 6950 or 6970?

Zion Halcyon

Zion Halcyon

2[H]4U
Joined
Dec 28, 2007
Messages
2,105
Here is the reason I ask -

I am not going to swap bios to make a 6950 a 6970 because I don't want to fry the RAM.

But if I go 6950, I AM planning on unlocking the shaders.

Setup is single monitor now (1920 x 1200), but will go multiple in future.

I guess what I want to know is just how close to a 6970 in terms of performance can I get with a 6950 and unlocked shaders?
 
I went with a reference MSI 6950 and flashed it with the Sapphire BIOS linked in the TechPowerUP guide to unlocking the shaders. It's not like flashing it is guaranteed to fry anything. They run pretty hot as-is, so memory could fry anyway. :D

Mine's doing just fine. I have 2D and 3D automatic profiles, so when I'm not gaming, it's running at 500/700 or so, and when gaming it's 880/1375, and I've had some long Black Ops and Dragon Age II sessions without issue. I'm very heavily leaning towards removing the enclosure and replacing the junk thermal paste with AS5 though.
 
Gaming benchmarks I have seen usually indicate a 2-3 frame per second difference, YMMV
 
Got a 6970 and i love it

extra dough , but for people who dont want to mess with bios , it was worth it. best card i ever owned so far
 
Takes about five minutes to flash the first time. Something going wrong is extremely unlikely if you're following the guide. But it has you backup the stock ROM. Honestly, there's almost no risk. Actually, what little risk there may be is probably independent of the flash.
 
The flash is straight forward......and I am no engineer, trust me.
The card can be set up to run any way you want with Afterburner.

I was on the fence, I bought two ASUS models and flashed them to 6970 and don't regret it.

I get nearly the same performance as my GTX 580 SLi and have more VRAM for three screen gaming.

The 6900 series Crossfire is way better than it used to be when I had 5870 E6 models.

The cards also use less power.

Do it.
 
if you are not comfortable with flashing your video card just get the 6970 for a few bucks more. if youre spending that much on a 6950..a 6970 isnt that much more and you dont have to worry about voiding your warranty
 
There's nothing to worry about. If something goes wrong, you flash the original rom.
 
GJSNeptune said:
There's nothing to worry about. If something goes wrong, you flash the original rom.
Click to expand...

Absolutely.

Just follow the TechPowerUp guide. ATI Winflash is about as easy as they come.

Just make sure you flip the BIOS switch to #1, save the BIOS in ATIFlash, then flash your new BIOS.

You have a failsafe in the second BIOS in position #2.

The cards are very easy to deal with, the instructions are excellent, and I've never flashed a GPU before.:D

Just make sure your computer is stable so you don't FUBAR it during the flash.
 
None of you guys are answering his question... He asked what was better WITHOUT flashing and the difference between the two...and not asking to be reassured that flashing is good or easy...

Anywho, I was in the same boat, I didn't want to flash because there was a chance I could mess something up no matter how easy it was. 6950 2GB was $260 and the 6970 was $320. I figured I'd spend the extra $60 and get the extra shaders and the 5-10 fps advantage plus I can OC it even further. Money really wasnt a issue to me so I just went with the faster ( albeit slighty) card and have no regrets.
 
heatthegreat said:
None of you guys are answering his question... He asked what was better WITHOUT flashing and the difference between the two...and not asking to be reassured that flashing is good or easy...

Anywho, I was in the same boat, I didn't want to flash because there was a chance I could mess something up no matter how easy it was. 6950 2GB was $260 and the 6970 was $320. I figured I'd spend the extra $60 and get the extra shaders and the 5-10 fps advantage plus I can OC it even further. Money really wasnt a issue to me so I just went with the faster ( albeit slighty) card and have no regrets.
Click to expand...

There are no extra shaders on the 6970 when you unlock the 6950. They are identical cards except the 6970 has slightly better spec memory.

Buying a 6970 is worthless especially if you plan crossfire. You can save $120 by crossfiring 2 6950s over 6970s and the performance difference is negligible.
 
He said he was planning on unlocking the shaders. That IS flashing. He also poses the question of 6950 unlocked and OCed vs 6970.

Anyways, you can achieve near 6970 performance with just the shader unlock and an OC. Bumping the Vcore up to 6970 levels (1.175V vs the stock 1.1V on 6950) will allow you to exceed those speeds if you are willing. As long as you aren't toying with the memory you should be fine.
 
I didnt see that he wanted to unlock shaders. That's my bad, but to say buying a 6970 is worthless is a little biased don't you think? I understand you have a 6950 and by saying it's worthless, you are justifying your purchase, but maybe people who bought the 6970 didn't want to go through flashing and setting voltages or whatever they had to do to make it a 6970 ( no matter how "easy" it may be ) I actually had the 6950 in my cart before I left fry's but decided to spend the extra $$$ so I could just plug it in and only have to worry about OC'n it. To me, that was worth the extra $$$ and not having to play a guessing game on if I voided my warranty or not.
 
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heatthegreat said:
I didnt see that he wanted to unlock shaders. That's my bad, but to say buying a 6970 is worthless is a little biased don't you think? I understand you have a 6950 and by saying it's worthless, you are justifying your purchase, but maybe people who bought the 6970 didn't want to go through flashing and setting voltages or whatever they had to do to make it a 6970 ( no matter how "easy" it may be )
Click to expand...

I don't care how you spend your money, I don't think having a certain item makes that item better just because I have it.

For instance my PSU is fairly shit and I wished I'd researched harder before buying it.

But getting a 6970 is pointless, considering just how quick and easy it is to unlock shaders and then overclock in CCC.... I mean AMD makes it so simple and risk free to do, they give you a program to do it, they even give you two Bios's in case you screw up. It literally takes 5 minutes.

You don't need to fiddle with voltages, just unlocking the shaders and bumping up core clock and memory in CCC will give you a card almost as fast as a 6970, you can overclock it further in MSI afterburner.

Personally if it was me I would send the $120 I would save from crossfiring on a SSD for the OS. Will make your PC much faster
 
Get a 6950, same outcome as in the other Dozen threads that are about the exact same thing. Look at the 2 6950s in my sig. I would have spent an extra $120 for 6970s and that $120 instead went towards better things. I have a friend with a single 6970 that can't beat either of my 6950s, it just doesn't overclock worth a damn. YMMV but again and I'm sooooo getting tired of this thread popping up every day at this point. 6950!
 
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