Gigabyte 6950 OC 1GB - unlock bios

[massaaris]

Hi everyone, here I will explain how to unlock bios for gigabyte GV-R695OC-1GD graphic card. This method probably can be applied to some other cards from 6xxx series, and maybe other manufacturers but you would have to figure out some things by yourself. As you might know, this card doesn't have bios switch. Also, it's bios is locked by hardware. It's default clock is 870MHz for GPU and 1250MHz for memory.
I tried to modify it's bios with RBE to unlock shaders to 6970 and also to move upper limit for GPU above 900MHz. It's not reference card but it was worth to try. Flashed it with ATIWinflash and after that I had BSOD on windows startup. I tried everything but without success, and then I realized it's bios is locked by hardware. Every tool I used for flashing failed with error "bios cannot be erased", or something similar.
I found out bios chip for this model is PM25LD010. It has 8 pins like in this picture:



Pin number 3 (WP# - write protect) need to be connected to pin 8 (Vcc - device power supply). For some other graphic cards you will need to take cooler off the card to have access to this chip. For this card luckily you don't have to. Here you can see where chip is located:



Pins 3 and 8 are already connected, for that I used very thin wire from cable like this (cut it from old power supply):



Result is, no warranty void and your bios is unlocked. Now, you can try to flash it and unlock 1536 shaders. On mine they were laser cut but you may have more luck Enjoy!

[Joshwaa]

Has anyone tried this or are all of them laser cut?

[erocker]

None of them are laser cut as far as I know.

[Joshwaa]

Erocker maybe you can give me some other help. How can I get CCC to go past 775mhz gpu clock on my HD5850?

[erocker]

Use MSI Afterburner utility.

[Joshwaa]

I would but when I use that it causes the other card in the system gpu clocks to jump all over. Other card is a HD6950 1gb

[erocker]

You bitmining or something? Then you'll have to flash a custom bios to the card that will allow for higher overclocks. I'm not so good with giving directions on that, perhaps you should start a thread about it and ask for help.

[AltecV1]

why do you have 5850 and 6950 in the same system?

[Pestilence]

Originally Posted by AltecV1

why do you have 5850 and 6950 in the same system?

Was thinking the same thing

[Joshwaa]

A 5 monitor setup is why one 47"TV 1080p Samsung and 4 23" 1080p LED-LCD ASUS.

So far my only choice is to run CCC and oc the 6950 then close it and use MSI AB on the 5850.
Supprisingly the setup works good. Thanks for the help so far.

[jasonnovak]

Has anyone else tried this and have results one way or another? It didn't seem to work the the OP, though there seems to be debate if these are laser cut or not. I see other posts saying they couldn't flash and it must be laser cut, but I wonder if they're doing this mod as well. I know when I first got my card (same one as in this thread) I tried just using RBE and it looked like it worked, but has the same number of shaders on reboot. At least it didn't get a BSOD.

[ExodusMaximus]

Originally Posted by Joshwaa

Has anyone tried this or are all of them laser cut?

I really have hard time believing in the whole "laser cut" shader units. Seriously - manufacturers use unified production process to save money, so to later create inferior gpu they would have to use a process which is not only expensive but could cause extra waste - no - I bet they just shifted the instruction to diferent mem address - I will try to evaluate bios hex and see if something pops out...

[mediasorcerer]

Originally Posted by massaaris

Hi everyone, here I will explain how to unlock bios for gigabyte GV-R695OC-1GD graphic card. This method probably can be applied to some other cards from 6xxx series, and maybe other manufacturers but you would have to figure out some things by yourself. As you might know, this card doesn't have bios switch. Also, it's bios is locked by hardware. It's default clock is 870MHz for GPU and 1250MHz for memory.
I tried to modify it's bios with RBE to unlock shaders to 6970 and also to move upper limit for GPU above 900MHz. It's not reference card but it was worth to try. Flashed it with ATIWinflash and after that I had BSOD on windows startup. I tried everything but without success, and then I realized it's bios is locked by hardware. Every tool I used for flashing failed with error "bios cannot be erased", or something similar.
I found out bios chip for this model is PM25LD010. It has 8 pins like in this picture:

Attachment 42880

Pin number 3 (WP# - write protect) need to be connected to pin 8 (Vcc - device power supply). For some other graphic cards you will need to take cooler off the card to have access to this chip. For this card luckily you don't have to. Here you can see where chip is located:

Attachment 42881

Pins 3 and 8 are already connected, for that I used very thin wire from cable like this (cut it from old power supply):

Attachment 42882

Result is, no warranty void and your bios is unlocked. Now, you can try to flash it and unlock 1536 shaders. On mine they were laser cut but you may have more luck Enjoy!

hi mate,very interesting discovery,i have the windforce 6850 oc,do you think it would work on that too?and is the bios locked on that card as well? reason i ask is that my idle fan rpm is 46% which i think is a bit high,i thought with a bios falsh and fan settings tweaked i may be able to lower the default fan idle speed,its slightly noisy at 46%.any help is appreciated,cheers frm me.

[ExodusMaximus]

Originally Posted by mediasorcerer

hi mate,very interesting discovery,i have the windforce 6850 oc,do you think it would work on that too?and is the bios locked on that card as well? reason i ask is that my idle fan rpm is 46% which i think is a bit high,i thought with a bios falsh and fan settings tweaked i may be able to lower the default fan idle speed,its slightly noisy at 46%.any help is appreciated,cheers frm me.

just use afterburner - much easier and you can create multiple profiles

[ExodusMaximus]

it would be so nice if whoever created atiwinflash and/or rbe would actually give us a memory address of - shaders unlock block - and address of the unlock bit... really... sometime I think that creators actually work for or get paid by ati/amd

[mediasorcerer]

Originally Posted by ExodusMaximus

it would be so nice if whoever created atiwinflash and/or rbe would actually give us a memory address of - shaders unlock block - and address of the unlock bit... really... sometime I think that creators actually work for or get paid by ati/amd

im no expert,but i know exactly what you mean by that comment,it applies to many things too.


trouble is with fan profiles,they dont seem to work so well with my card,i get odd fluctuations and find they wont play nice,ie quits on me,doesnt seem to hold./save profiles etc,

[jasonnovak]

I did some playing around and wasn't able to unlock it, but I'm not sure the bios is actually write protected. Here's what I did:

Extracted my BIOS (stock, I restored it before when I was messing around), loaded it into RBE and enabled 6970 shaders. I tried flashing it just to see what it would do before the hardware mod. It said it was successful, rebooted, shader count didn't change - just like recall from before.

So I pulled the card and did the wire trick, used a small wire and a little hot glue to tack it in place so it would be a temp mod - used a volt meter to make sure it was good. Booted back up and went to flash the modded bios again, but it said it the file was the same has what was already there and aborted. Makes it sound like the previous write before the hardware mod had worked.

I did more testing, but basically in the end I found when I pulled the wire mod, wrote the stock BIOS, extracted it in GPU-Z, it showed "6950" mod under shader unlock in RBE. I mod the bios to 6970, flash it, reboot, extract the BIOS again, load it into RBE, and the 6970 radio button is selected so it must have written. All the time GPU-Z showed 1408 shaders.

[mediasorcerer]

i tried flashing mine too,with rbe,it seemed to work,but then it didnt adjust the fans as i had expected[seemed to flash/reboot but no change etc],i was trying with same bios[saved etc] just so i could lower idle fan speed,
it annoys me having to use trixx etc for fan profiles,for some reason the moment i minimise trixx it looses settings,tried running as admin etc,but for some reason nothing plays nice with it,the card works great,no probs there,but 46% idle speed@33c is too hi in my op,

then again,it is dual fan,and i noticed one fan seems to run at a constant rpm,the other fluctuates,maybe 1 fan is fixed,the other is variable? this may account for "apparent" rpm,not sure still learning all this you know,but your post has given me hope anyway,and its powerful good to know that wire-3-8 is an option if needed,cheers ms.

[ExodusMaximus]

Originally Posted by mediasorcerer

im no expert,but i know exactly what you mean by that comment,it applies to many things too.


trouble is with fan profiles,they dont seem to work so well with my card,i get odd fluctuations and find they wont play nice,ie quits on me,doesnt seem to hold./save profiles etc,

I know what your problem is - get clocks and fan profile right and then save it and LOCK the profile (at profile 1) - click your "load at windows startup" and whala. Funny thing is that the fan profile won't kick in until you open AB, but just open it, an then minimize it to tray - works great

[ExodusMaximus]

Originally Posted by jasonnovak

I did some playing around and wasn't able to unlock it, but I'm not sure the bios is actually write protected. Here's what I did:

Extracted my BIOS (stock, I restored it before when I was messing around), loaded it into RBE and enabled 6970 shaders. I tried flashing it just to see what it would do before the hardware mod. It said it was successful, rebooted, shader count didn't change - just like recall from before.

So I pulled the card and did the wire trick, used a small wire and a little hot glue to tack it in place so it would be a temp mod - used a volt meter to make sure it was good. Booted back up and went to flash the modded bios again, but it said it the file was the same has what was already there and aborted. Makes it sound like the previous write before the hardware mod had worked.

I did more testing, but basically in the end I found when I pulled the wire mod, wrote the stock BIOS, extracted it in GPU-Z, it showed "6950" mod under shader unlock in RBE. I mod the bios to 6970, flash it, reboot, extract the BIOS again, load it into RBE, and the 6970 radio button is selected so it must have written. All the time GPU-Z showed 1408 shaders.

confirms what I though - I will compare some bios hex dumps - the ones that did unlock and the ones that did not. There is also a chance that control register has changed - once again - it would be so nice to see the actual source for some of the tools - I though atiwinflash was open source? If so - can I see the source cpp files? - or we can all believe in the "laser cut shaders" bs... lol

[leo766]

http://www.techpowerup.com/forums/sh...d.php?t=151456

^if you follow this guide after doing this bios writeprotect mod you will be fine....^

you guys reinstalled ur catalyst drivers after unlocking the bios and flashing it on the gigabyte 695OC 1gb like i did right?

cuz if the OP dumped this bios with GPU-z and then flashed in with atiwinflash(i used .13 not newer .14) through command prompt as admin with UAC turned off(start/search/uac) then re installed driver and bam 1536 shaders on a Gigabyte HD 695O 1GB (GV-R695OC-1GD) which comes guaranteed to run 870 core clock already

and in case u think i got this long ago, i want all you laser cut doom sayers to eat ur words, cuz i got this card from microcenter Nov 2! for 260$ it was the cheapest/fastest clocked 6950 they had, the rest was 2gb reference trash(imho for the 300$ a pop they were asking diamond and sapphire lol)

to me it seems there is just a lack of a unified set of carefully follow able instructions, ppl either do the right flash steps but don't hardware unlock, or hardware unlock but then try to flash an incompatible other cards bios on it, or dump the bios for modding with RBE instead of GPUz... i'm willing to bet there are tons of ppl with cards that are just begging to be unlocked if they would just follow the right steps

[rodrigo400]

Originally Posted by leo766

http://www.techpowerup.com/forums/sh...d.php?t=151456

^if you follow this guide after doing this bios writeprotect mod you will be fine....^

you guys reinstalled ur catalyst drivers after unlocking the bios and flashing it on the gigabyte 695OC 1gb like i did right?

cuz if the OP dumped this bios with GPU-z and then flashed in with atiwinflash(i used .13 not newer .14) through command prompt as admin with UAC turned off(start/search/uac) then re installed driver and bam 1536 shaders on a Gigabyte HD 695O 1GB (GV-R695OC-1GD) which comes guaranteed to run 870 core clock already

and in case u think i got this long ago, i want all you laser cut doom sayers to eat ur words, cuz i got this card from microcenter Nov 2! for 260$ it was the cheapest/fastest clocked 6950 they had, the rest was 2gb reference trash(imho for the 300$ a pop they were asking diamond and sapphire lol)

to me it seems there is just a lack of a unified set of carefully follow able instructions, ppl either do the right flash steps but don't hardware unlock, or hardware unlock but then try to flash an incompatible other cards bios on it, or dump the bios for modding with RBE instead of GPUz... i'm willing to bet there are tons of ppl with cards that are just begging to be unlocked if they would just follow the right steps
http://www.techpowerup.com/forums/at...1&d=1321118955

Hi, i´m a newbie in the forum. I bought yesterday this card (GV 6950OC) and i want to make the shader unlock. I don´t understand if i must make de wire connection and then follow de reference guide as you stated or just with that guide i can accomplish the unlock.

Thanks and greetings you all from Argentina.

[leo766]

trust me save urself the trouble and use a cicuit pen instead of a wire, for jumping the BIOS pins, their on the back of the card as shown on the first post, then use the the link i posted and flash, and you should be good to go

the issue is that i am not sure what exaclty the problem is, but these cards cant be flashed because simply looking on the gigabyte site makes it obvious that there are no bios's available for it

so u have to mod with RBE and flash the modded one, perhaps some changes can be made to the bios with write protection off, but honestly i think its just that when most "unsmart" ppl flash they use the atiwinflash -f command.... the -f meaning FORCE FLASH, meaning it completes weather it works or doesnt er at least looks that way

so to sum it up, go to any radio shack, adn get the circuit writer conductive pen(20$), i tried to do the wire trick like op, but the pins are so small getting a wire around them sould take a lot of time and effort IMHO

plus what i did was put a piece of masking tape on the bios so if i ever want to return the card, instead of putting scary acetone on my pcb(plastic+acetone= melted plastic) i can just rip off the take and severe the connection and remove the ink at the same time

but yes to answer your question you do have to do both

just make sure that when you follow the guide(not sure why u said reference guide, since these arent reference cards, and the link i posted isnt talking about a reference card either just one with a BIOS switch) and don't do somethig foolish like flash another cards BIOS on there, a 6970 bios will not work on these cards, it must be a shader unlocked bios you create with RBE 1.28(its really easy)

[buradd]

hey i think i may have got some silver connecting pins 7 and 8, vcc and HOLD#.. is that going to cause any problems?

i put a piece of masking tape down but theres still a tiny tiny tiny thin layer of silver that looks almost to be touching between the two pins #7 and #8

used conductive silver writer pen

[buradd]

ok so i did everything, and i got the little extra silver between the pins i just scraped it off as best as i could with a exacto knife..

when i started the cpu for the first time with this card in it, the masking tape ignited in a small short burst and then quickly fizzled out, i guess some was touching pins, the tape on the direct top of the bios chip remained in tacked.. i dont know if this was a solid connection because i dont have any way to test it im just a noob

i saved the bios to my desktop as 1.bin with GPU-Z, then i used RBE to edit and unlock shaders, then used atiwinflash .13 GUI mode, when it rebooted me i just turned off the power supply and waited 30 seconds, when i booted back up i was about to reinstall drivers, but GPU-Z says i unlocked all the shaders take a look here