Gadgetory

alright guys this is a 69 50 or is it there's been a lot of talk about a potential unlock from the 69 50 to the 69 70 now remember graphics card overclocking for a long time has been kind of limited like you can hear this is a 69 70 so the one physical difference between these cards is an 8-pin connector here whereas this one has two 6-pin connector so for a long time we haven't been able to properly overclock a lower-end card to a higher-end card for example the GTX 570 has fewer functional units on it than the GTX 580 you cannot even if you overclock this 572 the same speed as the 580 it will not have the same performance now a software unlocking of the the either usually they're laser-cut or somehow disabled functional units software re-enabling seems to be back there that was most Awkward way of saying that ever but according to tech power up the 69 50 should be possible to unlock to a 69 70 so I have a sample card here and I just want to go through the process with you guys and show you how dead simple it is so I downloaded the package from tech power up which has this in it okay so there's wind flash here I thought I was going to have to do the flashing do the BIOS update through the through bootable USB but it looks like I don't even have to do that because of this little sort of magic thing right here so this card has two bios's it is dual BIOS the 69 50 and the 69 70 both are there labeled one two so all I had to do was change it to the two position okay that's the first thing I had to do and then I have to go to flash to 69 70 alright then there's some little instructions here I press any key to continue flashing in progress please wait okay please restart your system for the changes to apply after reboot check the shader count using the gpu-z included in this directory so i've already opened up gpu-z because i wanted to see okay so our shaders that's the functional units I'm talking about more shaders potentially okay so guys check that out look closely and we're going to reboot the computer and see if we have successfully unlocked this 6950 into a 69 70 and if it really is that easy and takes only a couple minutes now here's something really cool about the dual BIOS on the 60 900 or rather the 69 yeah I guess all the 6900 series cards so far have this feature so the dual BIOS allows you to go oh okay that didn't work like let's say we get a bunch of artifacts all over the screen or it's not stable or whatever we can flash it back as you can see there was a file included for that but we could also just turn the computer off flip the switch to the one position and go back to our original bios just like that no problem at all whereas with with other cards you can run into issues where you can't you can't boot anymore because the bios didn't take and then you got to put in another card in another slot and boot to that one and then manually flash the other one and it can be kind of messy and a real pain in the ah pain in something anyway okay so know don't always ask me this so let's find out if we have more shaders now hmm no we don't okay maybe I did something wrong give me time to figure this out then all right I have found a different set of instructions on the tech powerup website that seems to be quite different indeed so I've downloaded a BIOS I'm going to reset with the BIOS which in the one position instead and see if I can find a way to make it work this way so stay tuned guys you're along for the ride on this one I guess alright so now we're running wind flash manually or rather ATI win flash manually so the instructions say now to load an image so I'm going to go into the whoops where my downloads anyway guess I better find those - downloads there we are okay so set under and school with this no I don't think it's there I think it was under yeah there we go okay so okay we have the BIOS image there so click load image followed by program so we're going to click program please wait flashing is in process something something something you're racing V okay this this looks like it took longer so that's probably a good sign your V BIOS was programmed successfully okay cool you have to reboot the system before the changes take effect alright I guess we'll do that so back in moment alright here we have the moment of truth again opening up gpu-z here we go here we go hey hey 15:36 unified shaders check that out so it was that easy this is not a cherry picked card in any way shape or form and it is now according to gpu-z completely unlocked to 6970 spec so the only thing to do now once you've unlocked your card is too extreme metamour chesil is to find out if it's actually stable so the only way to do that is to run some benchmarks run some games and see if you see any visual artifacts I did do a video a little while ago where I showed what an artifact was I don't know what it was called so unless you are like a really avid viewer you probably won't know which one it is but hey if you do remember the one please post it in the comments and guys please thumbs up on that particular comment so that we can all see what an artifact looks like so I'm just going to let you guys stick around while we run at least the first graphics test here and see if the card did manage to unlock successfully so far it looks alright so that is a pretty cool little tweak and I'm getting some funny looks from someone else in the office here he thinks I'm standing here in my office talking to myself so thanks for checking out my video on how to flash the Radeon 6950 bios to the 6970 and yeah make sure the credit goes where it's due because I am not the one who came up with this wizard at Tech powerup is truly a wizard and we all owe him a great deal for his gpus ed tool all of his great reviews that he does over there and this latest trick which is pretty phenomenal don't forget to subscribe to Linus tech tips