HD 6950 can be Unlocked to a HD 6970

If you have an HD 6950 you can flash it to a HD 6970 and get some extra performance out of your card. That’s right you can unlock a few extra stream processors on your HD6950.

Apparently currently shipping Radeon HD 6950 cards from all manufacturers – which actually are all the same card with different sticker – have their shaders locked via the BIOS method, so we can exploit it easily.

There are a few steps involved and you should exercise caution if you decide to attempt this. Make a back up of your existing BIOS on your card before flashing to the HD 6970.

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 the linked version of GPU-Z, 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 If you see a shader count of 1600, your GPU-Z version is outdated and you should get the one from the link here.
8. 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.

Head on over to techpowerup.com for more details.

Source: techpowerup.com