Radeon HD 6950 to HD 6970 unlocking

Colleagues from techpowerup.com has managed to unlock Radeon HD 6950 graphic card to get Radeon HD 6970 performance configuration.

Both Radeon HD 6950 and Radeon HD 6970 are based on the same AMD Cayman graphics processor, though Radeon HD 6950 has part of its graphics processor’s performance configuration locked.

Radeon HD 6950 can be get additional performance by flashing it with HD 6970 BIOS :

• Download the latest version of ATI Winflash
• Download HD 6970 BIOS, for example, Sapphire Radeon HD 6970. Important to note when selecting BIOS − the firmware should be from a reference design HD 6970 graphic card and it does not mater what brand it goes under.
• Make sure the BIOS switch is set to the first position.
• Run ATI WinFlash and press “Save” button to make a reserve copy of your current BIOS of videocard.
• Set the path for Radeon HD 6970 BIOS
• Start the flashing process, wait for it to complete and restart the system.

After system restart, you might need to reinstall videocard drivers, then check shader count using GPU-z tool.Original GPU-z 0.4.9 does not have support for Radeon HD 6900 cards, therefore, you should use latest GPU-z.

In case all procedures were successful, your will have Radeon HD 6970 with 1536 Stream Processors. Last, check for card stability in games.

If you have errors during flashing process, like “ID mismatch” or “Could not erase ROM”, then you can try flashing the card by using Windows command line:

Run atiwinflash-unlockrom 0

And then atiwinflash-F-P 0 bios.bin where bios.bin — file-name and path for Radeon HD 6970 BIOS.