Radeon HD 6950 Into a 6970 With a BIOS Hack

It would explain why their prices are so close to each other. This really is a fantastic breakthrough, until the new drivers stop allowing this.

AMD Fail, isn't the first time this happened. Anyone remember the triple core into a quad core a while back?

this used to work on nvidia cards too, now they laser cuts the SPs to prevent it

It still works on some GTX 465s, that's a pretty new card.

You're clearly not old enough to remember ATIs 9800GTs into XTs BIOS mods.
Plus, what's the fail about it? Did you maybe buy a 6970 and now you feel cheated out of 70 bucks?

Its not a fail, its just chip binning. Unlock at your own risk, there is a reason the chip in your 6950 went into a 6950 and not into a 6970.

Whoa cool....
Getting a HD 6970 at lower price

you don't risk much since 69xx series has double bios ;D one that you can change and one pernament.

I wonder why they made it so easy to mode that card...

I'm not aware of the 9800 GT XT issue, and my first PC had a TNT2. I just never heard of that. And the fail about it is that AMD is going to lose money, and face, over the fact that 2 products within the last 2 years have had simple BIOS bypasses to make them equal to their superior products that they sell.

Who would buy a regular dodge avenger over a charger if you could simply update the ECM in the car and all of a sudden gain a whole bunch of horespower? Same difference.

Additionally, I'm quite happy with my GTX285. I just think that AMD would have learned its lesson the first time

Because if 1337 boyz talk about it wannabeez will follow. There's 150 wannabeez for every real 1337.

Salez.

It is a fail when there's no countermeasures put in place by AMD to stop this sort of thing. Regardless of whether the chip itself was binned to be a 6950 over a 6970. This happened before with their CPU's, and it just seems like they don't care enough to do anything about it, or they didn't invest enough time/money to prevent this sort of thing from happening.

9500 (not 9550) softmod to 9700?

Chip Binning is not a fail. The chips on the 6950 might not have passed their quality control for a reason. Although at the end of the original article it seems that most will unlock without any problems

You need to visit the forums more often my good friend. That thing still going on as we speak.

AM3 Smeprons and be unlocked to dual cores

Athlon II x3 can be unlocked to x4's

Phenom II x2/x3 and be unlocked to x4's

Phenom II x4 xxxT can be unlocked to x6's (although these X4 T's are OEM cpu's last i checked.)

It's really not a fail to have hardware unlocked to something better. It in fact has turned into more of a selling point.

Although as we all mentioned on the forums, unlocking a cpu is not going to happen. If you bought something like a tri-core cpu, you should expect it to run as such and think of it as a bonus if it does unlock.




Oh amd has tried to prevent but i think they given up on such as everyone (including motherboard makers) have fought back.

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/g [...] ,8015.html

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=AMD+blocks+core+unlocking

Another reason why they probably dont appear to being doing anything about it, Have you though about whats going to be coming Sometime mid next year?

Bulldozer. Maybe there wont be unlockable cores as it is an cpu thats been changed around that cores aren't like what we know of them now.



But anyways, why keep on getting on AMD back about this stuff. Intel and Nvidia does this as well.

GTX 465 into GTX 470

Pentium Gxxx into a core i3 via buying some card for a paticular brand (like gateway) at best buy or something the nature of.

Those 2 are the most recent "Unlocking in someway to get better performance" from them. Everyone does this.

Good for customers, good for sales, at your own risk, not even risky, but might not work. The reverse strategy of Nvidia annoying people to promote sales... ;-)

boris: It's not a fail if they did it on purpose and someone maybe "leaked" the rumor to techpowerup

It was already announced and rumored before the cards were even launched that 6950 will be in limited number, because the chips turned out much better than they expected so they could make lots of 6970 from them.

AMD makes a good profit from both so rather than have people buy nVidia (close to the price of the 6970) why not sell them 6950 and gain market share/money?

The 6970 has a 6 and an 8 pin connector and the other one has just two 6 pins. The 6970 has faster memory I believe. I really hope people dont think that theyre getting something for nothing.

I wouldnt be suprised that in 2 weeks after this wave of getting something for free there might be alot of dead cards.

Not hating at all but theres a reason that chips are binned because they couldnt make it. Im sure that AMD is re-advising thier rma guidelines as we speak.

The 4th core on those were disabled because they were faulty...it wasn't a trick it allowed them to sell the product. Enabling that disabled core could be done easily but results varied I am sure. Selling one product under several different models is practiced in more hardware areas than most are aware of...CPU's is another area it is done. They stamp them out and the ones able to handle higher clock speeds and be stable are sold as the higher end product. Come on folks this has been done for years.

Flashing the BIOS on video cards voids the warranty but it is a good option if you gain a little performance.

This is such a stupid comment^ If you weren't so damn ignorant you would know that the CPU's were designed like that for a purpose and reason. I mean come on...AMD was advertising the core-unlocking features like a rabid dog for crying out loud...

Yeah but that didn't always work. The question will be whether the 6950 ALWAYS converts to a 6970 or not. If they just disabled cores just to sell it as a lesser product, versus because some cores were funky.

Good for customers, not so good for AMD, unless they made the locking intentionally weak.

This is not fail. It's a marketing WIN!

There definitely is no "fail" about this. Only a jealous person, or anti AMD person would say otherwise.

Meh, waiting on the 6990 4Gb card for my 2560 x 1600 res I game at. Wont have to worry about any sort of flashing of the bios to get more performance.

I also heard this from several sources as well. AMD was having a hard time filling the 6950 segment due to the high yields of 6970 chips. I also heard, a few months ago, that AMD was implementing new Bios in order to bin enough cards to fill the demand for 6950's. Hence they slight delay in launch. Seams like those rumors (which they were at the time) may have had some truth behind them.

Also would like to add that Ive been following this closely (since I ordered a HD 6950 before knowing about this little trick)and not everyone has had it work for them. So, it is not a 100% guarantee it will work. So, that leaves me to believe some cards were binned as HD 6950's due to the fact they actually failed testing in some way, while a good majority were perfectly good 6970 chips that were bios crippled to fill the segment.

BINGO. I'm glad someone here actually is seeing this properly. AMD is probably more than glad to sell either a 6950 or 6970 vs you buying something from Nvidia. The buzz generated about the cards will make them sell better in general.

Considering the cost for the two is likely not too far different, its a Win/Win for both them and the customer.

AMD had been doing pretty good with the black Edition of their CPUs, yet when Intel tried the "unlocked!" models, I didn't hear much buzz at all about them.

This is a good thing.

Does anyone not? Didn't think so.

ie. common knowledge fail.



You mean the 9800 pro, I assume?

Hopefully this will grab some of the people that were going to be heading over to Nvidia.

More money for AMD means better products down the line, which in turn means better competition which means lower prices, which means more fun gaming with awesome graphics for cheap!!!

AMD originally disabled the 4th core on the Phenom X3 because the cores were damaged. They didn't try to hide the fact that the extra core could be enabled, but warned that it could potentially cause stability issues.




That only worked on a few early GTX465's that were made using GF100 chips intended for GTX470's. Asus even used it for marketing purposes.

That's a breakthrough - quite simple solution.