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Turn your AMD Radeon HD 6950 to HD 6970 BIOS flash mod

By on December 27, 2010 5:32 pm

How to turn your S$459 card into a S$569 card… in just 5 minutes, no hardware tricks required!

What can be accomplished:
GPU: 800MHz to 880MHz
Memory: 1250MHz to 1375MHz
Shaders: 1408 to 1536 shaders
~11% performance increase!

Read on to find out more.

The candidate: Sapphire Radeon HD 6950 2GB Retail Card

Before:
How to participate in the lottery ( flash instructions taken from techpowerup: http://www.techpowerup.com/articles/overclocking/vidcard/159)

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 If you see a shader count of 1600, your GPU-Z version is outdated and you should get the one from the link here.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




 
 
After:




 
 
What was accomplished:
GPU: 800MHz to 880MHz
Memory: 1250MHz to 1375MHz
Shaders: 1408 to 1536 shaders
~11% performance increase

Discuss your successes / failures here:
"Three little sentences will get you through life. Number 1: Cover for me. Number 2: Oh, good idea, Boss! Number 3: It was like that when I got here." Homer Simpson
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