HD6950 - HD6970 BIOS Flash/Shader Unlock Guide

Fancy a free upgrade from your HD6950 to a HD6970? We show you how with a simple BIOS Flash guide…

Flashing a BIOS, be it a motherboard or graphics card has always been an unsettling process. The fear of ‘bricking’ your component through a bad BIOS flash and then suffering a fruitless search for a BIOS recovery method can be enough to disuade any body from making the leap of faith. Even experienced enthusiasts, myself included, still get apprehensive when flashing a BIOS but (usually) breath a sigh of relief when the PC comes to life and POSTs.

Many 2nd tier graphics cards, such as the HD6950 we are going to flash today are actually true high end cards. Previously, most cards were laser cut meaning a very tricky and often unsuccessfull hard-mod was required to unlock them. Today however some cards are simply locked by the BIOS. Why would manufacturers do this I hear you ask? Well it is simply cheaper to produce one GPU and soft-mod it down then to have separate fabrication processes for each individual card. For this reason, flashing a graphics card has become very popular, especially now some manufacturers are adding a 2nd BIOS to their cards making the whole process much less risky. Should things go awry, flashing back to a previous working BIOS is now much easier. There are however still some obvious risks involved so before we get underway with the guide please observe the disclaimer below:

The Vortez team accept no responsibility for any damage, electrical or otherwise to your hardware by following this guide. If you decide to follow this guide then you do so entirely at your own risk.

I cannot empasise this more strongly: Follow this guide, step-by-step to the letter. Any deviation or short cut could result in your hardware BIOS becomming corrupt which could leave you with a very expensive door stop.

Our victim today is a vanilla AMD HD6950 2GB:

We have only tried flashing a reference AMD HD6950 2GB card today as it is the only one we had to hand at the time of writing but reports suggest that this method should work for all reference HD6950 graphics cards with 2GB GDDR5. Those who have custom HD6950’s may wish to do further investigating if you want to ‘upgrade’ your card to a HD6970. We have however used a similar process on the MSI R6950 BIOS flash guide.

Procedure

Unlocking the HD6950 requires the card to be flashed. We noted previously that the BIOS switch on the card can either be set to the factory default, ‘2’, or the unprotected BIOS, ‘1’.

1.Set the BIOS switch to ‘1’ on the card (see image below) and reboot

2.Download the ATI Winflash application from here and place extract it to your desktop (for convenience in the following steps)
3.Download the HD6970 BIOS of your choice from here (Note that all reference card BIOS will support voltage tweaking on the latest version of MSI Afterburner.
4.Run ATI Winflash.

5. click Save to back up your HD6950 BIOS. We saved our stock BIOS in the winflash folder for ease of retrievel but you can save it anywhere you like, just don’t forget where is is!

6.Click on Load Image and select the HD6970 BIOS you downloaded previously.

7. Press Program to start the procedure.

6.Once the flashing is complete, reboot your system and open up GPU-Z to check that if the card has all 1536 stream processors. Depending on the BIOS downloaded, the flashed HD6950 will also boast the 880/5500MHz clock speeds of its bigger brother and operate at 1.175V. I highly recommend setting the Power Control Settings to +20% in AMD CCC to ensure that the card doesn’t throttle beyond its recommended TDP.

If this doesn’t work, there’s a second procedure that can be carried out.

1.Follow step 1-3 from the previous process.
2.Save the HD6970 BIOS in the Winflash folder and name it unlock.bin
3.Go to Start, Run, type in CMD and wait for the command prompt window to open up.
4.If the path listed is already C:\Users\”Username”, type cd Desktop\winflash and press enter, otherwise type cd “username”\desktop\winflash
5.Type “atiwinflash -unlockrom 0”
6.Type “atiwinflash -f -p 0 unlock.bin”
7.Wait for it to complete and it should prompt a message saying “Verified”

**UPDATE**

Due to some people having problems with the HD6970 BIOS, it is recommended that people flash using an unlocked HD6950 BIOS. The reason is that the two cards use different memory modules at different timings so the HD6970 settings may not be stable with the HD6950. Instead the new method I will detail below uses a proper HD6950 BIOS with all the stream processors unlocked but with all other settings as default including clock speeds and voltages. MSI Afterburner will allow you to overclock the card to HD6970 levels manually with fewer risks.

1.Set the BIOS switch to ‘1’ on the card and restart
2.Open GPU-z and click on the icon next to the BIOS version to back up the original HD6950 BIOS. Save it as original.bin
3.Download the unlock script and extract the folder. Save your original HD6950 BIOS from step 2 into the extracted folder.
4.Run the batch file and it will create a modded.bin file which is the new HD6950 BIOS with fully unlocked shaders.
5.Download the ATI Winflash application from here and extract the folder within. Save the modded.bin file into the extracted folder.
6.Run ATI Winflash, click Load image and select the modded.bin file. Click on program and wait for the process to complete.
7.Restart your computer and open GPU-z to check that all 1536 shaders are unlocked.

Stock

Unlocked

We can now see the fully unlocked card sporting all 1536 shader processes by having two SIMD clusters re-enabled, and the clock speeds being the same as the HD6970. What is remarkable is that despite our sample only overclocking to 865/5500MHz stably, it was fully stabled when unlocked thanks mostly to the higher voltage at which the core operated. It is important that the card is tested for stability after the unlock as the cores were binned for a reason and may not support such high clock speeds even with raised voltages.

I’d like to give full credit to W1zzard at Techpowerup for coming up with the steps to the procedure.

Results (Crysis Warhead)

Following the success of Crysis, the stand alone expansion “Warhead” was hotly anticipated to bring more game play, more weapons, improved visuals whilst maintaining better performance, the latter being what gamers wanted most. After all how many people upgraded their rigs just to play this game… In the game, you play as the upbeat Brit Sergeant “Psycho” Sykes, chasing down a Korean nuclear warhead. Throw in some ice shooting aliens and we’re bound to have a great game. It sure delivered.

Testing was done using Framebuffer’s Crysis Warhead benchmarking tool. The tests were configured to DirectX 10 at Enthusiast levels. Each test on the Ambush map was looped three times from which the average FPS was recorded.

In Crysis, we see the unlocked HD6950 getting an average 11.6% boost at all settings, making it on par with the other HD6970s tested.

Results (Far Cry 2)

One of the most hyped games of 2008, Far Cry 2 had some big shoes to fill. It was built to be the next best thing since well… Far Cry I suppose. Combining an open-world game play with highly detailed graphics, physics and AI, what more could we possibly want? The game puts us in the body of a malaria inflicted mercenary hunting down the “Jackal” in the heart of Africa, in a bid to stop an on-going conflict between two rival factions. The storyline can be hard to follow sometimes but I’m no game reviewer, so let’s concentrate on the graphics and performance. After all, we all need to know if our hardware will be able to handle the scorching savannah burning at the hands of our flamethrowers.

The bundled benchmarking tool was used on Far Cry 2, configuring the settings to Ultra and DX10. The small ranch level was chosen and each configuration was looped three times from which the average FPS was recorded.

Far Cry 2 shows the HD6950 attaining an overall 11.3% gain when unlocked. And again, the card performs very similarly to the other two native HD6970s

Results (Metro 2033)

Based on Novel by the same name, Metro 2033 is a first person shooter with elements of survival horror. As Artyom, you trawl through the mutant infested metro systems of post-apocalyptic Moscow. The game delivers presents a grim ambience that reflects on the overall atmosphere of the underground setting. Metro 2033 uses the setting as a back drop to showcase some of the best visuals of any games out now, making it the ideal benchmark for those looking for the best graphics card.

The bundled benchmarking tool was used on Metro 2033, configuring the settings to Very High and making use of DirectX 11. The frontline scene was looped 3 times for each configuration. The average FPS was recorded at the end.

When unlocked, the HD6950 nets a 10.3% increase in performance over its default specifications, once again putting it on par against the HD6970s.

Results (3DMark 11)

This Vantage benchmark suite from Futuremark introduces DX 10 & PhysX support. Despite being on the verge of DX 11 games arriving, Vantage still proves a popular testing ground for enthusiasts.

The HD6950 sees a significant 12.5% performance boost when unlocked to the HD6970. It performs no differently to the Gigabyte and ASUS cards.

Conclusion

All in all, it took no longer than 5 minutes to perform the flash procedure which as we have shown, provides impressive improvements. You may wish to do plenty of stress testing though as some cards, while appearing to flash successfully and unlocking the additoonal shaders will not run 100% stable. This is most likely down to the cards new memory timings being set too tight or the core may need additional voltage tweaks. Fortunately there are options which allow you to re-flash the card with edited BIOS’s that disable the memory flash section so just the shaders are unlocked. IF you are still not happy you can quite easily go back to the original BIOS you had by re-flashing the card again, returning the card to it’s former HD6950 state.

This procedure is one of those that is very easy to do even for a novice and aslong as you follow the guide carefully, it should go without a hitch.

We will be bringing you more guides in the future so please post your ideas in our forums for what you would like to see, be it overclocking memory, CPU or graphics cards or case modifications. We will do our best to accomodate your needs. Because this BIOS flash procedure works we will give it the Vortez stamp of approval.