HiS 1GB 6950 Shaders unlocked ?

[peonpiate]

Hello, this is my first post here but I have browsed this forum a few times in the past [nice forum btw]. I have sort of a "issue", I purchased a 1gb non-ref 6950 about a week ago, and I took the risk of backing up my stock bios, and with RBE, adding on the "6950>6970" shaders option to that stock bios and Flashing my card with it.

The flash went 100% well, no errors or any problems at all from that flash. And my card was not "write protected" either, just boot to DOS and flash away.


Now, once I booted back into Windows I checked GPUZ to see if there was a change to my shaders - and unfortunately they were still listed as 1408 unified. At first glance one would assume the shader unlock failed, but I took the liberty of testing some games prior to flashing, and yes they showed a rather large increase in framerate.


Here are my results [most of these games/apps are older btw]:
Numbers in bold are after the flash, non bolded numbers are without Bios flash [1408 shaders].

*Both stock BIOS and Unlocked Bios are using the same overclocked setting of -: 950core/1300mhz memory.

PCsx2 [emulator], game is Dragon Quest 8 [gpu hog]-
internal resolution = 1500x1500, 4xaa = 49-50 fps without bios Flash. 54 fps with Bios flash for unlocked shaders.

3dmark 03-
1280x1024
4xaa 16xaf
repeat each test 2x
-trolls lair- 293.4 fps 326.8 fps
-mother nature- 336.1 fps 369.3 fps
-ps 2.0- 792.2 fps 831.8 fps

furmark, benchmark-
1280x1024, 8xaa
score = 2412 points 2489 points
-FPS: min=33 max=67 avg=40 FPS: min=34 max=68 avg=41



Also, I had to lower my Core overclock by 15mhz after flashing the "shader" unlocked Bios. Nature test in 3dmark03 would crash otherwise on the flashed bios [while it was fine on the stock bios]. Perhaps it was more heat, or the extra shaders require more voltage to keep the gpu happy Idk...But I have 1.26V in the GPU as is so I lowered the core rather than raising voltage to compensate.




Now my question is...It definitely looks like the full 1536 shaders have been unlocked. But GPUz [and Trixx] still report my shaders as being 1408. Any comments as to why, is it because my card is non-ref ?

Thanks for any comments.

 

[Nitephyre]

Howdy, I bought the same card as you on Friday and pretty much followed the same process and the shaders look the same to me as well.

My problem though is that I did my BIOS backup with RBE and now I can't flash back to stock... the BIOS seems to have been made read-only. I did some more reading and found that it COULD be because RBE doesn't back up the stock BIOS properly, yet GPU-Z does.

So, how did you back up your stock BIOS, RBE or GPU-Z? If it's GPU-Z, would you mind attaching it for me so I can try to flash back to stock

 

[peonpiate]

Hi, actually it turns out that the shader unlock did not work...I guess I am to used to Rivatuner working its magic without babysitting it, Trixx doesn't seem as reliable on startup and doesn't always activate the OC settings. With that said, between bios flashes my overclocked settings were correctly working on the modded stock bios, and not activated on stock, hence the difference.

So I think its fair to say these cards are hardlocked.

Anyways I do have my stock bios backed up [His 1gb 6950], I used GPUz to do it.

 

[Nitephyre]

Thank you very much mate, if I get adventurous enough to do a pin short to disable write protect I'll use this to restore to stock.

Cheers!

 

[peonpiate]

This is a long shot to force the bios flash, but did you try this -

atiflash -unlockrom 0

atiflash -f -p 0 cayman.bin

?

Keep in mind, if you are using another card to boot your system, if your 6950 is in the second PCIe slot then swap the 0's to a 1 [the zero in this line- "atiflash -f -p 0" and this line "-unlockrom 0"]. A 1 would point atiflash to the second pcie slot.

 

[Nitephyre]

Yep, I tried that already... I believe that it allows you to flash once (as I was able to flash a modded BIOS with better fan control and the shader unlock, which didn't work), then it sets a write-lock on the bios somehow.

It's not a huge issue, as the card still works brilliantly, it's moreso my peace of mind