# AMD Radeon HD 6950 unlocked



## rchi84 (Apr 4, 2011)

Hi guys

I am happy to share some news. I have purchased a new mid range gaming rig and have ordered a Gigabyte Radeon 6950 2GB version. From what I can tell so far, it is the reference version with dual bios.

The system should arrive in a couple of days and I will keep you guys posted on whether I am able to unlock the additional shaders and whether I am able to reach the 6970 clocks.

For anyone interested, I will also describe the process, irrespective of my success or failure

Fingers crossed


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## Gaurav Bhattacharjee (Apr 4, 2011)

Subbed and waiting.


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## funkysourav (Apr 4, 2011)

> I have purchased a new mid-range *Upper-Mid end* gaming rig and have ordered a *Gigabyte Radeon 6950 2GB* version


here
fixed 
subscribed
BTW whats the rest of the config?


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## kamal_saran (Apr 4, 2011)

congrats bro for purchase. . . . . Waiting for procedure. .


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## rchi84 (Apr 4, 2011)

@funkysourav I mentioned it on the April buying guide thread, but this is the config I went with:

Core i5 2400
gigabyte ph67 B3 motherboard
4GB DDR3 1333 Kingston
Western Digital Black 1TB
CM 850 Silent Pro
CM Haf 912 ATX
Samsung p233t monitor
Gigabyte RAdeon 6950 2GB

I know the PSU is overkill, but I might add another 6950 a year later, if my system lags (unlikely i know   )

I decided that I could give up the 2500K and the CPU Cooler, to upgrade my GPU from a 6870 to 6950, and since the 2400 can perform at i7 950 levels, I'm more than happy with my decision.

No gaming k/b mouse because I had to fit Windows in my config. As costly as my mobo man


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## Jaskanwar Singh (Apr 4, 2011)

rchi waiting. 
excellent purchase.

but the monitor is p2230 i guess?


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## rchi84 (Apr 4, 2011)

hi Jas

The monitor is 2333t. Hadn't heard of it before, but it was available at a decent price, and Full HD. The response time isn't the greatest, but I am more of an RTS guys, so I can live with it lol


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## blademast3r (Apr 4, 2011)

How much didya pay for it?bought it from? And congrats


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## Jaskanwar Singh (Apr 4, 2011)

rchi84 said:


> hi Jas
> 
> The monitor is 2333t. Hadn't heard of it before, but it was available at a decent price, and Full HD. The response time isn't the greatest, but I am more of an RTS guys, so I can live with it lol



oh i see. but superb purchase. congrats once again.


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## funkysourav (Apr 4, 2011)

rchi84 said:


> hi Jas
> 
> The monitor is 2333t. Hadn't heard of it before, but it was available at a decent price, and Full HD. The response time isn't the greatest, *but I am more of an RTS guys*, so I can live with it lol



there aren't many good RTS around these days
this genre sadly seems to be dying under the weight of mindless FPS'


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## coderunknown (Apr 4, 2011)

@rchi84, congrats. great purchase


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## damngoodman999 (Apr 5, 2011)

always keep backup bios ! dont forget the switch ! gigabyte has good success rate of unlocking !

good luck !


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## topgear (Apr 6, 2011)

@ *richi84* - congrats buddy . waiting ( greedily ) for HD6950 to be unlocked


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## saswat23 (Apr 6, 2011)

Oh, great purchase. But can u plz post thr prices too????


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## rchi84 (Apr 6, 2011)

ok. slight change in config. they ran out of CM HAF 912 cases, and have instead given me the 690II Nvidia edition, for a slightly higher cost.

i5 2400 - 9500
Gigabyte ph67 B3 - 7000
4 GB Kingston DDR3 1333 - 2400
WDD 1TB Black - 3400
CM 690II - 5000
CM 850 Silent Pro - 7200
Samsung p2333t - 8000
Gigabyte Radeon 6950 2GB - 15000

I already had an APC UPS with me, so I didn't buy that, plus a cousin of mine gifted me a logitech G1 k/b mouse combo.

so grand total of 58000. Then I had to shell out 6000 for windows 7 Home premium 64 bit


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## Jaskanwar Singh (Apr 6, 2011)

great price of wd black and 6950 2gb. and is gigabyte available online?


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## damngoodman999 (Apr 6, 2011)

where did u get the gigabyte card ?


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## topgear (Apr 7, 2011)

^^ yep, I'm also interested to know - most of the dealers don't have have high end gfx cards from gigabyte ( though they should have ).


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## vickybat (Apr 7, 2011)

Gigabyte 6950 2gb @ 15k is a sweet deal. Ideal for a cfx setup and gaming at higher resolutions.


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## rchi84 (Apr 8, 2011)

alright guys. my system arrived yesterday and I've been tweaking away. here are my results.

first off, flashing your GPU is a risky thing if you don't know what you're doing. be very careful before you go ahead.

my method of choice was to use my existing bios and unlock the shaders and reflash it. to do this, i used the following (Google these and get the latest versions):

1) GPU-Z
2) Radeon Bios Editor
3) Ati Winflash

step 1. Fire up GPUZ and note your card details. My screen looked like this:

*img291.imageshack.us/img291/2295/1gpuz.png

step 2. as shown in the following image, click on the small button and export your current Bios to a folder of your choice. I named it 6950.bin

*img585.imageshack.us/img585/6421/2gpuz.png

step 3. Time to load the Radeon Bios Editor. After it launches, click on the Load Bios button, as shown. Load the Bios you'd saved earlier. Mine was the 6950.bin

*img718.imageshack.us/img718/3138/3rbeloadbios.png 

Once I did this, my screen looked like this.

*img852.imageshack.us/img852/4169/4rbebiosloaded.png

Step 4. Click on Additional features, as shown in this pic:

*img805.imageshack.us/img805/4171/5rbeadvanced.png

This will lead you to a screen like this:

*img857.imageshack.us/img857/4108/6rbeshaderunlock.png

The circled area is where the magic happens. Select the "6970 shader count". Then go to the bottom of the screen, where the option to save the bios is located. I saved it with the name "6970". don't bother with file extensions.

Step 5 . Make sure you download the latest version of ATI Winflash. the reason I say this is, the older versions weren't compatible with windows 7 64 bit. Run the program and you'll get this screen:

*img62.imageshack.us/img62/2592/7atiwinflash.png

select load image, as shown, and then you go to the folder where you saved the modded bios. once you do that, the option next to load image, called "Program" is activated. this is the button that flashes your modified bios onto the card. Before you press this, make sure that the BIOS switch on the 6950 is at slot 1. if it is, go ahead and press "Program".

the flashing process begins and then asks you to restart. Cross your fingers, like i did and restart the system.

Step 6. Launch GPU-Z as soon as you restart and hopefully, you'll see the screen that i saw  

*img268.imageshack.us/img268/3337/8success.png

Yes. I unlocked the additional shaders and my card ran 3d mark vantage fine without artifacts.

I am pretty happy with the results so far, and I don't think i will OC the card, as it handles everything barring Metro 2033, at max details. I don't want to risk frying my memory chip and can live with 4xAA  

So there you have it. pretty easy process as long as you're careful.

and yeah, I go the rest of my system from Delta, but the graphics card was found in a small shop in Ritchie street after an afternoon of searching. the guy was friendly and told me that the card had arrived only last week. I double checked to make sure the price was right. 15K was what he charged in the invoice, but added 1.5K in VAT when he delivered. so yeah, i paid about 16.5K in total.

Still happy with my purchase though. I kind of trust gigabyte more than sapphire and powercolor to be honest.

oh, and quick question. how do you modify a thread title after creating one?


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## Gaurav Bhattacharjee (Apr 8, 2011)

First of all, this is an excellent write-up. I'll ask the mods (or maybe I'll ask *ico*) to make this post into a separate sticky thread for all who want to unlock additional shaders in their GPU's (provided their GPU's are unlockable) in general and specifically for those wanting to unlock a 6950 2GB into a 6970 2GB. 



rchi84 said:


> oh, and quick question. how do you modify a thread title after creating one?



I guess its only the mods and admins who can do that. But I maybe wrong.


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## flamereaper (Apr 8, 2011)

the prices of your system is much cheaper than what is listed in the deltapage website. Did you bargain a lot?


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## vickybat (Apr 8, 2011)

*@ rchi84*

Congrats mate for unlocking the card. So 6950 2gb's can still be unlocked. That is really good and offers awesome vfm.


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## ico (Apr 8, 2011)

Congrats rchi84.

I can rename the thread for you. Just tell me what should I rename it to. I've renamed it to "AMD Radeon HD 6950 unlock" 


vickybat said:


> *@ rchi84*
> 
> Congrats mate for unlocking the card. So 6950 2gb's can still be unlocked. That is really good and offers awesome vfm.


yup! People in the USA are still getting their HD 6950 2GB unlocked with more than 90% success rate!


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## Gaurav Bhattacharjee (Apr 8, 2011)

ico said:


> Congrats rchi84.
> 
> I can rename the thread for you. Just tell me what should I rename it to. I've renamed it to "AMD Radeon HD 6950 unlock"



Better be "Radeon HD 6950 Unlock*ed*"??
Also what about the sticky post I asked??



ico said:


> yup! People in the USA are still getting their HD 6950 2GB unlocked with more than 90% success rate!



People in Europe are also getting the same thing.


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## Joker (Apr 8, 2011)

congratulations rchi84!!!


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## asingh (Apr 8, 2011)

Saw this thread now. Good work. RBE is cool. Had used it once to flash better fan profiles for my GPU BIOS'....' Best is it let's you update the BIOS as a file (on your HDD) and you can try the settings using Rivatuner before the flash.


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## blademast3r (Apr 8, 2011)

Congrats on the unlock.. but a word of caution.. Some unlocks are ending up with fried memory chips as the memory on the 6950 and 6970 are different.. there was a volt modded bios to reduce memory vcore to negate the effect


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## Jaskanwar Singh (Apr 8, 2011)

congrats rchi


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## rchi84 (Apr 8, 2011)

@ blademast3r yeah, flashing the 6950 with a 6970 bios is dangerous. But the method I used is very safe, as it uses the same bios as the one 6950 ships with, and only unlocks the shaders, without touching the volts  

Thanks guys. From what I can tell, any reference 2 Gb card has a good shot of unlocking the shaders. whether your card can run at 6970 clocks is entirely down to luck. Reference cards are 2 GB, with the standard cooler on the right side of the card, and has the dual bios chip.

So if you go for a model with custom cooling, like the MSI Twin Frozr II, then you wont be able to unlock the shaders as they are laser cut. The same goes for the newer revisions which have the cooler fan in the center.

And the additional shaders by themselves won't make a huge difference, unless accompanied by an overclock, but like I said earlier, as of now there are few games that will make this card sweat at 1920x1080.


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## vickybat (Apr 9, 2011)

^^ Yeah right. Its a pretty powerful card at stock. Enjoy fullhd gaming man.

Will you crossfire in future?

*@ gaurav*

Buddy we shouldn't make this thread "*sticky*" cause with the advent of next gen architecture gpu's, people will eventually lose interest and that too rapidly. We can point this thread to anybody querying to unlock a reference 6950 2gb in TDF.


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## vizkid2005 (Apr 9, 2011)

Congrats dude !!!


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## topgear (Apr 9, 2011)

Congrats rchi84  

BTW, is there any temp idle/load difference ??


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## Gaurav Bhattacharjee (Apr 9, 2011)

vickybat said:


> *@ gaurav*
> 
> Buddy we shouldn't make this thread "*sticky*" cause with the advent of next gen architecture gpu's, people will eventually lose interest and that too rapidly. We can point this thread to anybody querying to unlock a reference 6950 2gb in TDF.



Okay. 

But you have to agree his write-up was excellent...I was only considering to see _that post only_ as a separate sticky closed thread titled "How To Unlock Your Unlockable GPU".


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## vickybat (Apr 9, 2011)

^^ Ya i do agree on that. His write-up was very clear and easy to follow.


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## rchi84 (Apr 10, 2011)

well guys, just to give a quick update, I've been tweaking away with Afterburner.

On stock volts (1.1V) I am able to match the stock 6970 clocks of 880/1375.

the only issue is that it isn't furmark stable BUT (get this), every other benchie like Vantage, 11, Unigine and all my games run well enough as long as powertune is set at +20%.

with a fan profile set at 70% on load, i get around 65 Degrees and the card idles around 40. Room temps are around 34 degrees so I am quite happy.

Back to gaming at 6950 clocks though its nice to know there's more under the hood.


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## vickybat (Apr 10, 2011)

^^ Thats nice buddy. Can you post some gamebenchmarks in fullhd? If possible crysis2.

That will be really helpful and we can compare them with a stock 6970.


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## rchi84 (Apr 11, 2011)

Hi guys

Ran some benchmarks. Vantage for some reason, doesn't like the OC and actually gives my card a lower score lol.

For 3d Mark 11, on stock 6950 clocks, I get a score around 4700 on performance preset. The thing holding my scores down, i suspect is my i5 2400 CPU. 

On 6970 clocks, my score improves to 5100.

The problem is that I am running on catalyst 11.3 which futuremark hasn't approved yet, so i only get text results online.

ran the crysis benchmark. settings were 1920x1080, 8xAA, DX 10. 

2 years ago, my friend's pc died when we tried this 

this time, on stock 6950 clocks, i was getting around 37 FPS. On 6970 clocks, I was getting around 42 FPS.

I wish i had the money to buy crysis 2, but DX9 only is a major no-no 

so yeah, as weird as it sounds, i might actually be running into CPU bottlenecks or maybe my card doesn't perform all that spectacularly when OCd. I'm sticking with stock clocks for now.

pretty happy either way


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## Jaskanwar Singh (Apr 17, 2011)

rchi here they say -*www.techpowerup.com/articles/overclocking/vidcard/159


> Above method is only for 2 GB HD 6950 reference design cards. If you have a custom design or 1 GB card, then use RBE to modify your existing BIOS. Save the BIOS from your card, load it into RBE, enable the shader unlock option on the last tab, then flash that modified BIOS to the card instead of the one downloaded from this page.



so can the 1GB ones be unlocked too.


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## rchi84 (Apr 17, 2011)

Hi Jas.

From what I've read so far, MSI 1GB 6950s have been unlocked, while other models haven't.

Plus, I think with the 1GB cards, chances of unlocking are around 50%, while with a reference 2 GB card, i would say it's 90% (except for the Twin Frozr and the newer models with a central fan).

Again, it depends on a case by case basis. Some people might be unlucky enough to get a card with the shaders laser cut and so on


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## rchi84 (May 13, 2011)

Hi guys

Not to bump a dead thread or anything, but Legit Reviews posted an article on the same topic. Am including the link here:

Unlocking The AMD Radeon HD 6950 to 6970 - BIOS Flash Mod Guide - AMD Radeon HD 6950 to HD 6970 Modification - Legit Reviews


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## nilgtx260 (May 13, 2011)

^^ pretty much helpful


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## speedster911t (May 13, 2011)

rchi84 said:


> @ blademast3r yeah, flashing the 6950 with a 6970 bios is dangerous. But the method I used is very safe, as it uses the same bios as the one 6950 ships with, and only unlocks the shaders, without touching the volts
> 
> Thanks guys. From what I can tell, any reference 2 Gb card has a good shot of unlocking the shaders. whether your card can run at 6970 clocks is entirely down to luck. Reference cards are 2 GB, with the standard cooler on the right side of the card, and has the dual bios chip.
> 
> ...






I agree with the op as not all cards can be unlocked only the reference designs from asus amd itself sapphire & other good known reputed companies cards can only be unlocked as non ref design's have custom made pcb's with slapped on custom design coolers & stufff like msi twin frozr II series have they are specifically the companies have disabled the additional cores by laser etching or cutting the shader part & reducing the mem voltage & core voltage for improved temperatures & they further add more power phases typically like 6+1 or 6+2 votage regulator modules vrm's than standard 4+1 or 5+1 found on reference design one's & so it makes the non ref design a completely diff card in itself in terms of design i m talking not it performance part,.but still the reference cards have a pretty good chance of unlocking the cores and sometimes gaining additional memory bandwidth by flashing the original bios of a older card to a newer one,.but again as i have seen the success rates are only 50-70 % for reference design owners & 10-30 % for the non reference ones,.i think th op was a real lucky guy as he had got a refernce design one of a reputed brand & got his card unlocked to a upgraded 6970 which is almost 3-5k costlier than the latter  so free perfomance for the guy @the same price cheers to u mate  .


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## Jaskanwar Singh (Oct 31, 2011)

rchi when i press program, it says cant modify ROM.


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## rchi84 (Oct 31, 2011)

Omg! Thread resurrected from dead. Just as i was playing left 4 dead too lol.

Maybe your bios is locked jas. Don't think your card has the bios switch right?
 don't mess with it. Most people with the 1gb models can't unlock too.


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## Jaskanwar Singh (Nov 1, 2011)

It has bios switch rchi.


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## rchi84 (Nov 1, 2011)

Hmm, in that case, maybe the current bios is write protected, to act as backup?

Turn off your PC, flip the bios switch to the other position, restart and try to flash it.

For me option 1 was writeable, so maybe, Sapphire flipped the order around. Try it. if it doesn't work on both bios, don't risk frying them by forcing a flash through command prompt..


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## Jaskanwar Singh (Nov 1, 2011)

rchi i think best will be to leave the card as it is currently


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