all right guys this is a 6950
or is it there's been a lot of talk about a potential unlock from the 6950
to the 6970. now remember graphics card overclocking for a long time has been
kind of limited like you can here this is a 6970 so the one physical difference
between these cards is an eight pin connector here whereas this one has a
two six pin connectors so for a long time we haven't been able to properly
overclock a lower end card to a higher end card for example the gtx 570 has
fewer functional units on it than the gtx 580 you cannot even if you overclock
this 570 to the same speed as the 580 it
will not have the same performance now
a software unlocking of the the either usually their laser cut
or somehow disabled functional units software
re-enabling seems to be back there that was the most awkward way of saying that
ever but according to tech powerup the
6950 should be possible to unlock to a 6970
so i have a sample card here and i just
want to go through the process with you guys and show you how dead simple it is
so i downloaded the package from tech powerup which has
this in it okay so there's wind flash here i thought i was going to have to do
the flashing uh do the BIOS update through the uh through a bootable usb
but it looks like i don't even have to do that because of this little sort of
magic thing right here so this card has two BIOS's it is dual BIOS the 6950 and
the 6970 both are they're labeled one two so all i had to do was change it to
the two position okay that's the first thing i had to do and then i have to go
to flash to 69 70. all right then
there's some little instructions here i press any key to continue flashing in
progress please wait okay please
restart your system for the changes to apply
after reboot check the shader count using the GPU-z included in this
directory so i've already opened up gpuz because i
wanted to see okay so there's our shaders that's the functional units i'm
talking about more shaders potentially okay so guys check that out look closely
and we're going to reboot the computer and see if we have successfully
unlocked this 6950 into a 6970 and if it
really is that easy and takes only a couple minutes now here's something
really cool about the dual BIOS on the 6900 or rather the 69
yeah i guess all the 6900 series cards so far have this feature so the dual
BIOS allows you to go oh okay that didn't work like let's say we get a
bunch of artifacts all over the screen or it's not stable or whatever we can
flash it back as you can see there was a file included for that but we could also
just turn the computer off flip the switch to the one position and go back
to our original BIOS just like that no problem at all whereas with with other
cards you can run into issues where you can't um
you can't boot anymore because the BIOS didn't take and then you got to put in
another card and another slot and boot to that one and then manually flash the
other one and it can be kind of messy and a real pain in the
uh pain in something anyway okay so no
don't always ask me this so let's find out if we have more
shaders now hmm
no we don't okay maybe i did something wrong give me
time to figure this out then
all right i have found a different set of instructions on the tech powerup website that seems to be quite different
indeed so i've downloaded a bio so i'm going to
reset with the bioswitch in the one position instead and see if i can find a
way to make it work this way so stay tuned guys you're along for the ride on
this one i guess all right so now we're running winflash
manually or rather ati win flash manually
so the instructions say now to load an image so i'm going to go into the
whoops where are my downloads anyway i guess i better find those Linus
downloads there we are okay so
what's that under let's go with this no i don't think it's there
i think it was under yeah there we go
okay so okay we have the BIOS image there so click load image followed by
program so we're going to click program please wait flashing is in process
something something something erasing v okay this this looks like it took longer
so that's probably a good sign your v BIOS was programmed successfully
okay cool you have to reboot the system before the
changes take effect all right i guess we'll do that so i'll be back in a
moment all right here we have the moment of truth again
opening up gpuz here we go here we go
hey hey 1536
unified shaders check that out so it was that easy this
is not a cherry picked card in any way shape or form
and it is now according to GPU-z completely unlocked
to 69-70 spec so the only thing to do
now once you've unlocked your card is to
extreme benchmark chess is to find out if it's actually stable so the only way
to do that is to run some benchmarks run some games
and uh see if you see any visual artifacts i did do a video a little
while ago where i showed what an artifact was i don't know what it was called so unless you are
like a really avid viewer you probably won't know which one it is but hey if
you do remember the one please post it in the comments and guys please thumbs
up on that particular comment so that we can all see what an artifact looks like
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
did manage to unlock successfully so far it looks alright so that is a
pretty cool little tweak and i'm getting some funny looks from
someone else in the office here who thinks i'm standing here in my office talking to myself
so thanks for checking out my video on how to
flash the Radeon 6950 BIOS to the 6970
and uh yeah make sure the credit goes where it's due because i am not the one
who came up with this wizard at tech power up is truly a wizard and
we all owe him a great deal for his GPU zed tool all of his great reviews that
he does over there and this latest trick
which is pretty phenomenal don't forget to subscribe to Linus tech tips