This is probably a bad news if you’ve already bought a Radeon HD 6970, but if you haven’t, then you can probably consider this a great upgrade if you’re shopping for one. AMD’s better deal just got better, as thanks to a less secure locking method AMD’s new Radeon HD 6950 can now be unlocked to a full blown HD 6970 with just a few mouse clicks. No bios flashing, just simple click and click.

The original number of unified shaders for HD 6950 is 1408, but once you unlock it, you’ll get 1536 shaders, which is what the HD 6970 has. Then, you’ll be able to adjust the speed of your unlocked card to match the HD 6970’s speed. GPU clock speed will be bumped to 880MHz from 800MHz, as well as memory speed which will be bump to 1375MHz from 1250MHz. This can be done easily without any adjustment in voltage. In case something goes wrong it is easier than ever to recover the card thanks to AMD’s new Dual-BIOS feature.

Here’s what you can do to ‘unlock’ your HD 6950:

1. Grab ATI Winflash from here (32 & 64-bit).
2. Download HD 6970 BIOS. (The Sapphire BIOS linked to will work on all reference design cards from any vendor.)
3. Make sure the BIOS switch on the card is set to the 1 position.
4. Run ATI Winflash, click Save to save your BIOS, so you have a backup in case something goes wrong.
5. Load the HD 6970 BIOS into Winflash by clicking Load Image, followed by Program.
6. Let the flashing process complete and reboot your system.
7. Check the shader count using GPU-Z, it should show 1536. Make sure you use the linked version of GPU-Z, the official 0.4.9 version does not support HD 6900 Series properly. If you see a shader count of 1600, your GPU-Z version is outdated and you should get the one from the link here.
8. Check stability in Windows desktop applications and games.

P/S: If you get an error like ID mismatch or Could not erase ROM, then you’ll have to do some extra work in a Windows command prompt (or DOS): Run atiwinflash -unlockrom 0 followed by atiwinflash -f -p 0 bios.bin where bios.bin is the path and filename of the HD 6970 BIOS you downloaded.

Techpowerup has tested the “unlocking” on three HD 6950 cards: one AMD engineering sample, one HIS media sample and one ASUS retail card. All of them unlocked perfectly and run at HD 6970 speeds now. You can check the full details at the link below.

SOURCE via Techpowerup