How to enable additional shaders on Radeon HD 6950

[Qed]

I think you are experiencing the same issue I had a while back in the thread. You are using Internet Explorer and viewed an Adobe Flash video. For some odd reason, when you do this, the voltage on the card changes to 1.000, and the clocks are set to 500/1250 (or 500/1350 if you are using the 6970 bios) regardless of what you have it set for. What is worse is the clocks will not go into 3D mode.

If you chage the page with the viewed video, it goes back to normal. I installed Mozilla Firefox and that stopped the madness.

Flash 10 is using 3D acceleration, i'm having that on a simple HTML 4 page :-/ If i remember correctly you had your frequency jumping while browsing, mine is pretty steary at max, i think it's a drivers issue.

Are you running 2 monitors?

Yes :-(

Flashed sapphire hd6950. After 2 hours of gameplay got somekind of artifacts in 3d. Flashed back to old. Still artifacts. Lower clocks. still artifacts. Switched to 2nd bios. Still artifacts. Installed new drivers. Still artifact. Dirt2 isn't going to 5760 x 1080 res. anymore.

[url]http://img151.imageshack.us/img151/2867/naamloos2e.jpg[/URL]

Did you flash it with a 6970 bios? If yes, you most likely fried your card. If you want to play on that resolution i suggest you to get 2xHD6950 in crossfire with only shaders unlocked.
The 3 different resistors on the 2 card are very close to the VRM and may cause a wrong voltage once you flash the 6950 with the 6970 bios.

 

[BZB]

Anyone else experiencing high clock of the Sapphire 6950 in idle? I'm talking with only shaders unlocked.

I found 4 profiles in the bios:

00:
GPU 800 MHz
RAM 1250 MHz

01:
GPU 150 MHz
RAM 150 MHz

02:
GPU 500 MHz
RAM 1250 MHz

03:
GPU 725 MHz
RAM 1250 MHz


The card is using the profile 02 in idle and not the 01. My HD5870 has a normal behave, it is using the profile 01.

01:
GPU 157 MHz
RAM 300 MHz

If you're getting profile 2, then your card isn't fully idling. There is probably something running that is using video processing, like a browser running the latest version of Flash, a TV card or other video app that uses hardware acceleration.

For instance, I get profile 1 with nothing much running, but I get profile 2 when my TV card is running.

 

[Ecto Plasma]

Successful Unlock on a PowerColor HD6950

I used the HD6970 BIOS posted in the article and used CCC to OC to 950MHz on the GPU and 1450MHz on the RAM. I ran furmark on stress mode for 9 hours and never reached above 73C with the fan manually set @ 70%. Crysis Warhead runs @ ~35FPS @ 1080P 8xAA! (Finally) No artifacts so far. I picked this card up for $300CAD (taxes included).

 

[yonef]

Is there any chance we can edit these profiles. I do not need my GPU to run 500 Mhz just to keep up with the flash, right? I'm using GPU-Z to monitor GPU load and when card is clocked to 500/1375 GPU load is 1-3% (shocked) I can do hardware acceleration on flash even on 250/150, right? So why AMD put the GPU clock that high? I wish I had a chance to lower that power profile to lets say 300/150. I'm sure some low-end cards will struggle to do HW-accelerated flash on idle clock, but this is cayman GPU, we have 1536 shaders to deal with damn flash.
Is there any chance to edit these power states, especially profile 02 ?!

 

[f0d]

hi all
i went out and bought a sapphire 6950 as soon as i saw this mod, i flashed the asus 6970 on it and tested to make sure it was reliable
the memory doesnt increase score when i lower the clocks (i have noticed with ddr5 that theres no artifacts when going too far with memory - just reduced performance) - 1375 mem any higher clocks and i get reduced performance and lower clocks i get reduced performance also (so it JUST does 1375) - i also tested with max AA as possible to stress as much vidmem as possible

940mhz core - tested this for 5 hours of looping 3dmark and around 10 hours of playing battlefield bad company 2

BUT
i cant get the asus smartdoctor software running -i definatly have the asus bios it says so in GPU-Z

im even running the asus driver from the website just incase that made a difference
but all i get when trying smartdoctor is "error - can not find graphics card information"

anyone have any ideas why it wont work?

thank you to everyone who made this mod possible - i missed out on the 9500's and i wasnt going to miss out on this one

 

[Qed]

Is there any chance we can edit these profiles. I do not need my GPU to run 500 Mhz just to keep up with the flash, right? I'm using GPU-Z to monitor GPU load and when card is clocked to 500/1375 GPU load is 1-3% (shocked) I can do hardware acceleration on flash even on 250/150, right? So why AMD put the GPU clock that high? I wish I had a chance to lower that power profile to lets say 300/150. I'm sure some low-end cards will struggle to do HW-accelerated flash on idle clock, but this is cayman GPU, we have 1536 shaders to deal with damn flash.
Is there any chance to edit these power states, especially profile 02 ?!

You will be able to change these prfiles as RBE will support 69xx cards, but you should not touch anything.
Profiles are set by drivers and changing a profile but not letting know to the driver is a bad idea. Just wait for the next drivers (we are using a modded version of the 10.11) and see how's going. My HD5870 is perfectly fine and i expect catalyst 11.1 will fix this issue on the 6950.

 

[tecnoworld]

agree. Newer driver and newer RBE are needed!

I'd like to increase voltage for the GPU to 1.175v asap.

 

[LagunaX]

HIS Radeon HD 6950

Out of the box switched jumper to bios position 1.
Required the atiwinflash unlock rom before it would flash.
Quick and dirty stability test for artifacts is 3dMark11 Demo#2 (won't artifact in benchmark tests but will artifact in the demo test 2 if not stable...)
Stock:

Modded Shader bios:

HIS 6970 bios:

Stock:

Modded Shader bios:

HIS 6970 bios:

Stable on HIS 6970 bios

Thanks again W1zzard!

 

[itsdanny]

By the way, @LagunaX, use the latest version of GPU-Z (0.50) to get the correct displayed info.

 

[abirdie4me]

Qed, try disabling your 2nd monitor in CCC and watch your temperatures drop. I idle at 38 degrees with one monitor running, 56 with 2 monitors on. And that's with NOTHING running, including IE and flash.

 

[buddatech]

Thanks to all that made this flash/mod possible! I successfully flashed two XFX 6950's with XFX 6970 BIOS Torture tested them for 3 days now, super stable even @900/1400 "like a rock"

I was really on the fence about 2 GTX 580's and 2 HD6970's for my 3x 30" 3007's and this mod made my decision a bit easier... with the money saved I may just grab a 3rd 6950 and unlock

Edit:
Only draw back for now is that I'm running them @ 16x 8x otherwise top card cooks at about 96c

Idle temps: 37-38c top and 34-35c bottom card
Load temps: 90-92c top and 88-90c bottom card

Ambient temps between 20 and 23c

 

[bystander]

Qed, try disabling your 2nd monitor in CCC and watch your temperatures drop. I idle at 38 degrees with one monitor running, 56 with 2 monitors on. And that's with NOTHING running, including IE and flash.

Just in case you aren't aware of why this is. When two monitors are hooked up, it has to run at higher clock speeds, particularly the memory, or the 2nd monitor will have bad flickering when anything changes on it. This is also something that Nvidia cards do for the same reason.

 

[bladerunner_tr]

dudes, gddr5 ram used at 6950 are 5000 mhz , but 6970 has got 6000 mhz, check hynix , so, there is a problem, or will be. im having some artifacts seldomly. GPU is ok but ram is not.

 

[buddatech]

I guess it really depends on luck of the draw, although it's still too early to tell for those who have been successful. Just like not all CPU's will overclock using low voltage or even high clocks with moderate to high voltage.

 

[calvinbui]

im starting to get rendering errors now :S default clocks

edit: i think its a dx11/dx10 error, im not getting it on dx9
edit2: on stock, no error. once shaders are unlocked = error i'll try and get up some screenshots of it

 

[Flak]

I had my 6950 flashed to a 6970. But with all the memory scare (propoganda? lol) in the various forums I downloaded afterburner and tried underclocking the memory back to 6950 speeds. But in my case underclocking the memory by even 1mhz introduced stuttering in games and benchmarks (this happened on my particular card with any 6970 bios I tried).

So I flashed to a modified 6950 bios. I tried Asus first to use smartdoctor. Smartdoctor loads and lets me overclock, but changing the voltage doesn't seem to actually affect anything (that or gpu-z v0.5.0 isn't showing the change). With or without smartdoctor my max core clock with the 6950 bios is the same as it was for the 6970 bios (which is 940core so far) but with the added bonus that the card in general runs much much cooler now across all temps shown in gpu-z.

 

[Bensam123]

You know you could cut out almost all these problems if someone edited the article that this thread is linked from, that tells everyone to flash it to the 880/1375 6970 Bios. Instead everyone is unlocking their shaders and overclocking their memory obviously more then it can handle.

Oh, u got that wrong
i did what he said and THAT works fine now
Though why is sc2 having such problems?

Sorry

SC2 uses more of your GPU and stresses your card harder then most games, since it is newer. You'd probably encounter similar issues in Bad Company 2 or Crysis if you have them. The memory clock speed is too high, thats why everyone is having stability problems.

 

[bystander]

You know you could cut out almost all these problems if someone edited the article that this thread is linked from, that tells everyone to flash it to the 880/1375 6970 Bios. Instead everyone is unlocking their shaders and overclocking their memory obviously more then it can handle.



SC2 uses more of your GPU and stresses your card harder then most games, since it is newer. You'd probably encounter similar issues in Bad Company 2 or Crysis if you have them. The memory clock speed is too high, thats why everyone is having stability problems.

You might want to say, some people. Most people aren't having memory issues, just a few that are posting. Most are happily playing.

 

[turbobeta]

You know you could cut out almost all these problems if someone edited the article that this thread is linked from, that tells everyone to flash it to the 880/1375 6970 Bios. Instead everyone is unlocking their shaders and overclocking their memory obviously more then it can handle.

Agreed. I think that using the 6970 bios which runs the memory at different voltages, clocks, and timings, is the source of almost everyone's problems. After flashing to modified 6950, all my problems are gone.

 

[Qed]

Anyone with a Sapphire 6950 remeber the position of the BIOS switch when you get it our of the box?

Qed, try disabling your 2nd monitor in CCC and watch your temperatures drop. I idle at 38 degrees with one monitor running, 56 with 2 monitors on. And that's with NOTHING running, including IE and flash.

It was a Crossfire problem, i removed 1 card and how it's at 450 MHz with browser and some othe stuff opened. The 2nd monitor still connected.

 

[itsdanny]

Smartdoctor loads and lets me overclock, but changing the voltage doesn't seem to actually affect anything (that or gpu-z v0.5.0 isn't showing the change).

GPU-Z v0.50 doesn't show the voltage change, although it is applied. You can detect it by the temperature increases and the higher withhold when possibly increasing the clocks which was previously before unstable.

Anyone with a Sapphire 6950 remeber the position of the BIOS switch when you get it our of the box?

I don't know why, maybe it is actually like this, although, mine was set to the 2nd, which is the read-only BIOS.

 

[f0d]

so nobody else has this error when trying to use smartdoctor and the asus bios?

You might want to say, some people. Most people aren't having memory issues, just a few that are posting. Most are happily playing.

very true - this (now) 6970 has been rock solid through at least 12+ hours (so far) of bfbc2 and 6+hours hour looping 3dmark11 with 8xAA to stress the memory more

Anyone with a Sapphire 6950 remeber the position of the BIOS switch when you get it our of the box?

mine was in position 1

 

[Jynks]

Update: Crossfired 6950 gigabytes shader unlocked to Rui's modded asus 6950 bios with an i7 950 OC'd to 4Ghz are giving me P8600 in 3DMark11.

This is Ok i guess but i have seen people with crossfired 5870s getting slightly above P9000 which is a bit disconcerting.... OCing my cards to maxed clocks without tweaking the voltage makes no difference to the score....

Must be a way I can improve their performance...

 

[whippoorwill]

Bought a Sapphire 6950 for 250 euro, flashed it with the 6970 bios. All worked well, no problem in games. I ran Furmark the whole night (12 hours) no crashing. However I have run in to a few anomalies.

GPU-Z, Speccy and CCC seems my card as the 6970 (6900 series) but other programs like Furmark, dxdiag and 3Dmark see my card as the 5700 series.

When I was using the Winflash or RBE utility it was telling me that I'm using the 5700 series. Again

Personally I think it's a problem with the drivers. I did a clean install (DriverSweaper and CCleaner) of both 10.12 and 10.12a hotfix and it gave me the same issues. When I had no drivers installed it showed my card as Standard VGA or Standard ATI VGA

My results so far
Furmark
I ran Furmark for 12 hours my results on 1920x1080 were max temp 91 and average fps 87.

Heaven
min 16 fps, max 68, average 35 fps (total of 899 points) Not sure if thats good but I was expecting better scores. Most likely the driver.


3Dmark Vantage and 3Dmark11
3Dmark 11 was really poor with only 4500 points (and about 10 fps on average in all the tests) Vantage gave me better results but it was about 20~25% better than my old 4850. Again I blame the driver for this.

Gaming
I played several games: Crysis, Amnesia, Mass Effect 2, Bad Company 2, Dirt 2. All of the games detected my card as the 5700 series. Performance was good but I still had a feeling I wasn't getting everything from the card.

Overclocking
I did a light overclock from 880/1375 + 10% to 900/1400 + 10% with no problems in games or Furmark (4 hours)

Tweaking fan speeds.
I saw a user suggesting using RBE to modify the fanspeeds in the BIOS and I did so but I didn't see any change. 80 degrees should have been running at 50% but ran at 42%. So no joy until the new RBE comes out.


Conclusion
I'm quite insecure/disappointed about the performance and the weird anomalies I'm getting but I'm almost certain it's the current driver issue. Hopefully the new 11.1 driver will have proper 6900 series support and bring me better results. If not I might be considering a move to Nvidia

EDIT:

I made a screenshot with the card detection anomaly.

 

[Kaali]

@whippoorwill

I think your results are good !

Mine on Heaven with a sapphire 6950 with unlock shader bios and oc @ 840 GPU , 1325 Memory :