6950 CFX Questions

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Thanks for the drivers advice

About the other part, what are people recommending now?

Is it best to leave them as 6950 and OC them heavy? Best to unlock shaders then light OC to be safe? Full on 6970 BIOS?

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That sounds about right..I did read that overclocks on the memory can cause problems due to the differences in the power design on the two cards (6950 and 6970).

As far as the shader unlock goes, is that any different from a regular 6970 BIOS flash? When you unlock shaders only, is it just a modded 6950 BIOS or is the full 6970 BIOS?

Thanks for the input, going to get 11.4 downloaded now in preparation as well as the BIOS once I figured that out.

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You can just unlock the shaders, or use 6970 bios, which clocks it higher and changes the ram settings. Unlock the shaders, then OC to 6970 clocks, it's much better for your card.

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How do you just unlock the shaders? Is there a modded 6950 BIOS to do that? I see a lot of guides on how to simply flash a 6970 BIOS but not many on just unlocking the shaders alone.

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http://www.techpowerup.com/vgabios/8....101123_1.html

Those should work and just unlock the shaders, then OC the difference if you want.

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Thanks! Going to try this method first (unlocking shaders but leaving it as a 6950).

I have a feeling results will be more than enough to play BFBC2 with eye candy at 2600x1600

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11.4 isn't the official release though, right? I found some early preview 11.4 drivers at Guru3D, are those the ones?

http://downloads.guru3d.com/AMD-Cata...load-2687.html

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It should be. The 6970s will kill the card most likely(due to different volts at stock, and different VRAM timings), while just unlocking will do nothing most likely . Same performance too!

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Did you also do the unlock method instead of the full 6970 BIOS? Just interested since you have the cards

Downloaded the 11.4 drivers, going to try those once I get these in today.

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I believe he did, as he says unlocked and not flashed, not saying for sure though. But trust me, the 6970 bios will fry it MUCH quicker, due to different VRAM timings. The performance is the same, even with different RAM timings.

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I do trust that I got the 6950 crossfire to get the best price / performance and save money, not to throw it away with risky stuff ^.-

Going to simply flash the modded 6950 and keep the volts stock or close and pump up the clocks a tiny bit

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You can probably do 900 or more with some volt increases. It won't kill it, it's the different VRAM timings that do it in. I can probably mod some 6970 bios to have the 6950 volts and memory timings, so you can tri/quad fire it with a 6970 or 6990.

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I have Afterburner up and working now with my 460, does that mean it will probably work with the new cards, or is it an issue localized to the 6950s, or just localized to you?

Curious because I am very comfortable doing my monitoring/overclocking with Afterburner.

Here are some 6970(So you can tri/quad with a 6970/90) with the 6950 stock clocks, and memory timings. Also unlocked the over clocking, so you can clock higher

Afterburner was fine with just one card. But with crossfire, it just did not want to play nice. I had two issues that I did not want to deal with:

1) The overclock will NOT stick to the second GPU on computer restart if you have the box 'apply Overclock to similar GPU' checked. The only way to have both GPU get the overclock is to uncheck that box and overclock both separately.
2) The second GPU would go to 100% load right off the bat on computer restart - on idle. The only way to bring it down to idle clocks is to start something graphically intensive such as Kombuster, furmark, and benchie and then just stop it.

I faced those issue with MSI AB 2.1 and never able to find a fix. Some folks got around that by save the overclock profile to a key. On computer restart, they hit the key to apply overclock. But to me, that did not resolve #2 and I did not want to hit a key to apply overclock each time I restart computer. Maybe later release of MSI AB has fixed that, but I quit inquiring.

I did the registry hack and CCC limits got increased to 1600 clock and 2500 memory. And it was overclocking galore ! If I needed volts, I was ready to mod my BIOS using RBE. Fortunately, mine went to 920 clock on stock volts.