Hi I'm trying to unlock my card also!
I have the same question. According to your pic, is the performance mode position 1 or is the silent mode position one. I try'd almost every thing and my card is from April 14th 2011.
Could you tell me if you have your card succesfully unlocked and what you did? Thanks
Sorry for my poor English.
Since the R6950 TFIII cards do not have a "1" or "2" labeled anywhere on the card or the housing, it may be less confusing to just refer to the positions as "Performance" vs "Silence".
Bystander used the procedure on REFERENCE cards so the bios switch settings may be opposite of the TFIII's... but I really don't know for sure cause I don't own any reference 6950's. Den Sorte Los told me he left the switch on his TFIII in the performance mode too.. and his DID unlock..
"RANT" - I'm really disappointed that AMD would go to all that trouble to lock out the extra shaders.. As a show of my appreciation, my all future builds (averaging $2500 and up) will all be INTEL / NVIDIA based.. Hope that extra $90 dollars they wanted was worth it.. cause now I'm gonna spend my thousands of future dollars on NON-AMD products... AMD really blew it with my future business.. laser cutting the GPU's was a BAD MARKETING MOVE.. SO LONG AMD ... (ahh.. that felt good to say!) "END OF RANT"
I left my switches in "Performance" mode when I tried to flash them. Since I DID see a change in CCC Graphic Overdrive I'm assuming that the flash did take, but both cards still show 1408 shaders.
So I most likely have laser cut GPU's... (thanks AMD!
) I did flash them both with the r6950pex.bin supplied by MSI. (thanks MSI!
) Bystanders instructions say to flip the switch towards the back of the card... (but which side does he consider to be the back?) Thats why I provided the PIC of the card on my prior post showing the Performance and Silence positions.. On the TFIII's, performance mode is flipped towards the side where you connect up the VGA cables. Silence mode is towards the power connectors side....so if you are holding the card with the Fans facing toward you, the power connectors will be to the right of the bios switch, and the Front of the card is to the left of the switch.
I used Bystanders instructions, and tried using the bios modding tool, but the shaders did not change, so I tried it a 2nd time and substituted the r6950pex.bin instead. Note: On the 2nd try, I skipped the modding part since the r6950pex.bin was already modded by MSI. On instruction #4 below he states that Position 1 is towards the back of the card... well on the TFIII card that would be "Silence" mode.. (which by my understanding is the backup / nonflashable setting) So I left the switch towards the Front of the card (Flipped towards where the VGA/HDMI/DP connections are at.. just like my pic from the prior post shows) I downloaded ATIWINFLASH v2.01.13 and then used steps 10-13 of bystanders procedure and substituted the r6950pex.bin bios supplied by MSI.
Here is bystanders procedure:
"Step 1) Download ATI Winflash: version 2.01.13
(The newest version 2.01.14 has been reported to not work).
2) Install winflash in the root directory (i.e. C:\winflash)
3) Download the script to modify the bios and extract it: www.techpowerup.com/wizzard/Mod_BIOS_HD_6950.zip
4) If you have a BIOS switch, set it to the 1 position (switched towards the back of the card)
5) Run ATI Winflash, click "Save" to save your BIOS, be sure to make a copy of this and save it some where safe in case some thing goes wrong.
6) Make a copy of the saved BIOS and rename the copy to "original.bin"
6.a) If you cannot see the file extensions, you need to open the Folder Options in the control panel and uncheck the option "Hide extensions for known file types"
7) Copy the "original.bin" file to the script folder "Mod_BIOS_HD_6950"
8) Execute the "run.bat" batch file
9) Look in the folder "Mod_BIOS_HD_6950" and copy the file "modded.bin" to the folder you installed ATI Winflash in (C:\winflash)
10) Open up the command prompt (Start->All Programs->Accessories) you may have to right click and run as adminstrator
11) Change to the ATI Winflash directory with the command "cd C:\winflash" or what ever directory you saved it in
12) Type "atiwinflash -unlockrom 0" (the "0" stands for the first PCIe card installed, "1" will work for the 2nd card)
13) Type "atiwinflash -f -p 0 modded.bin" (the "0" stands for the first PCIe card installed, "1" will work for the 2nd card)
replace modded.bin with r6950.bin if your using the MSI supplied BIOS.
WARNING: do not turn off your computer until step 13 is completely finished.
You should have successfully installed the modified BIOS. You will see a window pop up to say it was verified and ask you to
reboot if everything went as planned.
14) To verify that you succeeded in unlocking the shaders, use GPU-Z and look to see that you have 1536 Unified shaders.
If your system becomes unstable after you reboot, you'll have to reflash the original saved BIOS back onto the card following steps
10-13 and using the "original.bin" BIOS in place of "modded.bin".
If you cannot boot from this card and have the dual BIOS switch, switch it to the number 2 position, and boot up and right before you flash the original BIOS back, flip the switch to the number 1 position."
During the flash, a box popped up with a status bar...sorry no pic of that, then another box (see pic below) popped up.. As soon as I clicked ok, another message popped up indicating to restart the computer.
)
I guess I can live without that extra 3-5%. I bought two of these R6950 TFIII cards. the S/N on the 2nd card is almost identical to the 1st. 
I have the MSI TFIII, and I think I'm gonna give it a try. I think I understand the procedure, but I'm not sure what the above statement means. What do I need to do to install Winflash in the root directory? When I download Winflash, there is no installation option, as it just runs as an exe. Anyone wanna explain this to me? I swear, this must be the most newbish question I've asked in years. 
