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Gör inte som dessa människor säger, köp inte ett HD6950 och lås upp streamprocessorerna. Orkar inte skriva upp all info, men kan copypasta.
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With all the buzz about buying the cheaper 6950 and “unlocking” it to a 6970, I thought I share some info on that, as some of the info floating around is misleading.
First, I want to thank the guys at TPU, and other sites for the work and info they’ve done.
At the same time, a lot of people aren’t getting the full info, without doing a lot of digging and reading, so I thought I’d condense a few things for everyone, so that someone doesn't kill their card, or feel like they didn't quite get what they thought they would.
Now, doing the 6970 BIOS on a 6950 card will NOT make it a 6970. Now this doesn’t mean you can’t get the 6950 to run as fast as or faster than a 6970 and outperform it, because you probably can. I’ve got 2 that I can run and bench at 950, while stock is 800 and 880 respectively.
There are several physical differences between the 2 cards:
They have different power connectors.
6950: 2x 6 pin
6970: 1x 6 pin and 1x 8 pin
The 6970 has a beefed up power connector for additional ground.
The 6970 has higher rated memory chips.
6950: Memory rated to 5000 MHz
6970: Memory rated to 6000 MHz
There are a few other physical differences as well, but these are the main ones.
Here’s where the problem comes into play:
With about 99% certainty, the consensus is that the 6970 BIOS has different memory timings, which can cause many problems on a 6950 card.
Besides that, the main thing the flash does that people want are :
Unlocked shaders (from 1408 to 1536), increased clock speeds, and a voltage boost.
Since AMD seems to be spending more time trying to find ways to lock people out of the BIOS then they do on drivers, this has caused some problems.
The single largest problem that a lot of people don’t seem to realize is that even if they flash a 6970 BIOS on a 6950 and they have no problems and are 100% stable, the drivers still see it as a 6950, NOT a 6970.
This is the difference in the Hardware ID’s:
6950: 6719
6970: 6718
Without going into all the details, I myself have been playing with RBE and Winflash, trying to tweak things a bit, but even if I get a “successful flash” with an old ID of 6719 and new ID of 6718, the drivers still see it as 6719. (yes, even on fresh installs)
Going back to my earlier comment, AMD has put something in there drivers that compares something on the card, to verify parts of the BIOS match internal digital signatures, or it won’t boot with the drivers installed.
For those that don’t know, these cards come with a dual BIOS , one unlocked for minor tweaking, and the other locked, as a safety backup.
It looks like the unlocked one is for manufacturer tweaking, without giving them full access to all parts of the card.
No one seems to know where this is done, but my guess is the driver probably reads the ID from the locked BIOS, since all of the info isn’t stored in the unlocked BIOS, otherwise doing a 6970 flash would update the info on the driver readings.
Now for some good news.
There is a safer way to unlock the shaders and OC’ this card. I’m not going to go into detail, it will take up too much space, and there is already plenty of info out there on how to flash the BIOS.
What you want to do is go over to TPU (Tech Power Up) and download a handy program one of the guys made that will let you unlock the shaders only of your 6950. This will give you the full 1536 shaders of the 6970, without any other mods. It works perfect.
Second, you can use the latest RBE 1.27 to manually adjust the voltages up slightly higher if you want, to give you more OC’ing headroom.
Doing this gave me a good 50 mhz higher clock on one of the cards, then the stock voltage. I put it to 1.175, the stock voltage for the 6970, as opposed to the 1.100 for the 6950.
The latest GPU-z does read voltage, but not from the card, so don’t expect that to show a voltage change, but adjusting it in the BIOS does change it. I used SD to confirm it, as it does read the card and allow changes. To verify this I changed from 1.100 to 1.175, SD showed this.
I even tried 1.200 just to see, and SD showed 1.2 when I started it up. I'm back to 1.175 for now.
Whatever I get that is fully stable on that voltage is what I’ll stick with for now.
Now, One important thing, do NOT try to change clock speeds with this, or even adjust fan profiles, it doesn’t work yet. You will be under the sad illusion that it worked, until you boot back into windows, and are sitting at a black screen. Then you will have to jump through hoops to fix things. This involves booting into the second BIOS, removing drivers, rebooting, re-flashing, etc..
Been there done that several times trying to tweak things, as the drivers lock into certain BIOS settings, and if anything is off, the driver won’t run and you’re stuck at a black screen.
Without drivers installed things will seem fine, but the minute the system reboots from a driver install, they’re not, so FYI.
NOTE: Anytime you do a flash, don't restart, but shutdown and pull power for 10-20 seconds or so. Restarts don't fully change everything.
Once you’ve done the shader unlock and optional voltage change, now you need to make a decision on how far you want to try and OC this. The CCC ( ATI Overdrive in the Catalyst Control Center) will do some minor OC’ing, and is relatively simple and easy. If you want to go higher, you’ll need an OC’ing tool. Most the card manufacturers have one available.
I’ve played with the Sapphire Trixx and Asus SmartDoctor. I like the Trixx better, as it is better for fan control, but the SD has voltage adjustment options, and an OC enhancement option that will also unlock the CCC to insane speeds.
All these cards are reference design, so you can easily use RBE to change manufacturer ID, allowing your choice of OC tool, as some tools like the Asus SmartDoctor won’t work without an Asus card installed.
I have Sapphire cards. I actually flashed them to Asus 6950 cards, as that had a slight OC built in, plus I could then use the SD to unlock the CCC. I then removed SD, and the higher OC option stayed in CCC.
One more thing I noticed, the CCC did seem to allow higher stable clocks then Trixx or SD. This could change down the road, but for now, the CCC seems to communicate better with the cards.
Unfortunately the fan control sucks, it’s either Auto, which stays quiet but runs hot, or a single manual speed, which is loud. Just changing from Auto to manual at 50%, I dropped 20 deg on temps.
It’d be nice if they either allowed a BIOS change to adjust the fan profile, or even added an option to adjust the curve based on temp, so that you can get more aggressive for gaming, without listening to the higher sound the minute you change it.
Anyway, for now I have found it easiest to do the following.
Set a “default” profile, and a “Gaming” profile with higher clocks and fan at 55%.
Thus for day to day stuff, it stays low and quiet, then if I want to game, I switch to the other profile. When I'm done I switch back.
Hopefully one day we’ll be able to adjust clocks and fan profiles via the BIOS, then we won’t have to deal with “profiles” via CCC. My 4870x2 is that way, and it’s nice, nothing extra running in the Background, when I game, it kicks in higher speeds, voltage and an aggressive fan profile, when I’m done, back to slow, quiet 2D clocks and fan.
Anyway, long winded, but if anything, if you want that “free” performance boost, remember, unlock shaders only, then tweak voltages if you want, and use either CC or another OC tool to adjust GPU and memory speeds.
This will basically give you everything the 6970 flash would do, but no worries about bad memory timings.
