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all right guys this is a 6950

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or is it there's been a lot of talk about a potential unlock from the 6950

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to the 6970. now remember graphics card overclocking for a long time has been

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kind of limited like you can here this is a 6970 so the one physical difference

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between these cards is an eight pin connector here whereas this one has a

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two six pin connectors so for a long time we haven't been able to properly

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overclock a lower end card to a higher end card for example the gtx 570 has

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fewer functional units on it than the gtx 580 you cannot even if you overclock

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this 570 to the same speed as the 580 it

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will not have the same performance now

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a software unlocking of the the either usually their laser cut

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or somehow disabled functional units software

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re-enabling seems to be back there that was the most awkward way of saying that

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ever but according to tech powerup the

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6950 should be possible to unlock to a 6970

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so i have a sample card here and i just

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want to go through the process with you guys and show you how dead simple it is

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so i downloaded the package from tech powerup which has

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this in it okay so there's wind flash here i thought i was going to have to do

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the flashing uh do the BIOS update through the uh through a bootable usb

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but it looks like i don't even have to do that because of this little sort of

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magic thing right here so this card has two BIOS's it is dual BIOS the 6950 and

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the 6970 both are they're labeled one two so all i had to do was change it to

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the two position okay that's the first thing i had to do and then i have to go

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to flash to 69 70. all right then

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there's some little instructions here i press any key to continue flashing in

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progress please wait okay please

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restart your system for the changes to apply

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after reboot check the shader count using the GPU-z included in this

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directory so i've already opened up gpuz because i

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wanted to see okay so there's our shaders that's the functional units i'm

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talking about more shaders potentially okay so guys check that out look closely

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and we're going to reboot the computer and see if we have successfully

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unlocked this 6950 into a 6970 and if it

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really is that easy and takes only a couple minutes now here's something

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really cool about the dual BIOS on the 6900 or rather the 69

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yeah i guess all the 6900 series cards so far have this feature so the dual

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BIOS allows you to go oh okay that didn't work like let's say we get a

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bunch of artifacts all over the screen or it's not stable or whatever we can

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flash it back as you can see there was a file included for that but we could also

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just turn the computer off flip the switch to the one position and go back

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to our original BIOS just like that no problem at all whereas with with other

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cards you can run into issues where you can't um

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you can't boot anymore because the BIOS didn't take and then you got to put in

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another card and another slot and boot to that one and then manually flash the

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other one and it can be kind of messy and a real pain in the

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uh pain in something anyway okay so no

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don't always ask me this so let's find out if we have more

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shaders now hmm

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no we don't okay maybe i did something wrong give me

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time to figure this out then

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all right i have found a different set of instructions on the tech powerup website that seems to be quite different

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indeed so i've downloaded a bio so i'm going to

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reset with the bioswitch in the one position instead and see if i can find a

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way to make it work this way so stay tuned guys you're along for the ride on

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this one i guess all right so now we're running winflash

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manually or rather ati win flash manually

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so the instructions say now to load an image so i'm going to go into the

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whoops where are my downloads anyway i guess i better find those Linus

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downloads there we are okay so

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what's that under let's go with this no i don't think it's there

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i think it was under yeah there we go

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okay so okay we have the BIOS image there so click load image followed by

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program so we're going to click program please wait flashing is in process

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something something something erasing v okay this this looks like it took longer

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so that's probably a good sign your v BIOS was programmed successfully

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okay cool you have to reboot the system before the

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changes take effect all right i guess we'll do that so i'll be back in a

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moment all right here we have the moment of truth again

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opening up gpuz here we go here we go

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hey hey 1536

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unified shaders check that out so it was that easy this

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is not a cherry picked card in any way shape or form

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and it is now according to GPU-z completely unlocked

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to 69-70 spec so the only thing to do

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now once you've unlocked your card is to

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extreme benchmark chess is to find out if it's actually stable so the only way

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to do that is to run some benchmarks run some games

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and uh see if you see any visual artifacts i did do a video a little

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while ago where i showed what an artifact was i don't know what it was called so unless you are

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like a really avid viewer you probably won't know which one it is but hey if

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you do remember the one please post it in the comments and guys please thumbs

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up on that particular comment so that we can all see what an artifact looks like

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so i'm just going to let you guys stick around while we run at least the first graphics test here and see if the card

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did manage to unlock successfully so far it looks alright so that is a

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pretty cool little tweak and i'm getting some funny looks from

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someone else in the office here who thinks i'm standing here in my office talking to myself

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so thanks for checking out my video on how to

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flash the Radeon 6950 BIOS to the 6970

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and uh yeah make sure the credit goes where it's due because i am not the one

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who came up with this wizard at tech power up is truly a wizard and

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we all owe him a great deal for his GPU zed tool all of his great reviews that

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he does over there and this latest trick

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which is pretty phenomenal don't forget to subscribe to Linus tech tips