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I effed up my 6950 BIOS

teamblack

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Hey folks,

I've got myself into a serious pickle here, I need some help to get out of it and hopefully it won't be too hard to reverse. So here's the timeline of what I did:
-I bought a HIS 6950 - the one WITHOUT the BIOS switch. (ebay pic showed me the one with it, but that's a different story)
-I followed the tutorial on flashing the BIOS, and watched the Linus techtips video on it, more than a few times over.
-I backed up my original 6950 BIOS
-loaded the 6970 BIOS in winflash, and then got the "ID mismatch" error.
-Followed the next step for cmd prompt HERE to the letter.
-Restarted my computer, blank screen. Had to hold power to shut off.
-I put in a MSI 7850 into the primary slot to get video back, then startup repair happened, but failed.
-some more restarting, trying different slots (using a EVGA 790i FTW triple slot board)
-finally got Windows up with 7850 in primary, 6950 in secondary. It started installing drivers, getting my hopes up, but then my display shut off (display hooked to the 7850).
-hard reset, blank screen.
-Removed 6950. Using only the 7850, got display and used the AMD cleaner utility to wipe AMD drivers
-booted computer again with both 7850 in primary slot and 6950 in secondary, didn't get blank screen FINALLY.
-tried to load my original 6950 BIOS using ATI winflash, got "ID mismatch" error
So here's what I'm caught up on:
-I can't follow the cmd prompt instructions as they require using ONLY the 6950 - If I do that, I don't get display.
So, that's all I got. I'm completely newb at this bios flashing thing, so I'm going to need some techpowerup mojo to help get me out of this.
Attached GPUZ before and after. The broke version gave me some interesting figures, lol.
 

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teamblack

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hey please don't make me beg, alright.
All I have to do is flash the BIOS back on a card that won't display. I'm sure there's some cmd prompt magic out there that can make it happen, it can't be that hard right?
 
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Are you sure you have the adaptor # correct? eg - the zero in the CMD line example below.

Type "atiwinflash -f -p 0 unlock.bin"

You may have gotten the "ID mismatch" trying to push the BIOS into the 7870.

This is where on-board graphics really helps...
 

brandonwh64

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First mistake you made was trying a 6970 bios, RBE can take your stock bios and apply the shader unlock and this has been the safest way.
 

teamblack

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OK I flashed the original BIOS in RBE. I now have the correct BIOS, but my stats are still waaaay out of whack.
Unless it's normal to have 4.29 Petabytes of RAM on a single video card.

EDIT: fixed it by updating my drivers. The card works again!!

Last question: How do I update my shaders using RBE?
 

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brandonwh64

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make a copy of your original bios then open RBE and on the last page there is a option to unlock shaders only then save the bios and uninstall the drivers then do atiwinflash -f -p 0 bios.bin
 
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Glad you are fixed.


so as described above but in usb boot load, use command atiflash.exe -f -p 0 "yourbiosnamedhere.rom" -f is flash command -p is force flash (prevents mismatch) and 0 is location 0 (your first x16 slot, if you use another graphics card change this) and the filename.

USB atiflash.exe is the best way to do it.
 
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Unless it's normal to have 4.29 Petabytes of RAM on a single video card.

Absolutely, W1zard worked pretty hard on that softmod.
 
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If you are using a Z77 board then the black screen after 6950 -> 6970 BIOS flash is a known issue. The correct solution, as others have already pointed out, is to dump your original 6950 BIOS, open it with RBE, unlock the shaders (and optionally push the clocks up to 6970 spec) then save and flash it.
 

teamblack

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OK I put the 6970 shader mod on the 6950 bios in RBE, flashed & rebooted the card, but GPUZ still shows me only 1408 shaders instead of 1536.
I didn't do anything with the drivers. Would that matter?
 
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I will do the same as #9 .
 
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Hi

I didn't do anything with the drivers. Would that matter?

Yes; need to reinstall the drivers so they can reference the unlocked shaders

Note: always make a backup of the vbios before commiting to a flash

atb

Law-II
 

brandonwh64

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OK I put the 6970 shader mod on the 6950 bios in RBE, flashed & rebooted the card, but GPUZ still shows me only 1408 shaders instead of 1536.
I didn't do anything with the drivers. Would that matter?

This pretty much means your card will not unlock.
 
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I tried this once, but since it yields Such a TINY performance gain , I never tried it again, but I used RBE to look @ my 6950 bios, and it shows the Shaders Already set to 6970 count. GPU-Z on the other hand, doesn't. No matter though, Senseless to risk ruining a perfectly good GPU, for a pointless modification. Even though I DO have the bios switch , I decided it's not even worth the trouble to Try again. It would behoof others to realize the same. a 00.72% performance gain is NOT worth the risk.unless of course The card you got is a real dog anyway, and You can't go anywhere but up I guess, But I can't see that being the case.
 
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