Which ATI 6950?

cody471 said:

Yeah XFX make premium quality products...go for XFX

I've already got the Sapphire (bottom card). This thread was started back in Jan 2011.

Thanks.

damn didnt see the date =)
anywayscongrats on your new card u f%^king rich man =D

it's a 2 gig version.

i'm not 100% sure about non-flashability, maybe there's a way, but i don't think it's as simple as a 'standard' 6950 - it also doesn't have the second bios chip:

While the AMD reference design had a Volterra voltage regulator and a dual BIOS switch, MSI has chosen to go without the switch and a CHiL voltage regulator. The CHiL controller is supported in MSI's excellent overclocking software Afterburner, so this shouldn't be a problem. When we tried to unlock the additional shaders to turn this card into a HD 6970, we were out of luck. It seems the ASIC on our test sample has the shaders properly locked, so a BIOS mod is not possible. Whether this is the case for the HD 6950 Twin Frozr II production cards is unknown at this time.

source

and

Now one point we have to mention - with the first revision of the reference models you could flash in a R6970 BIOS into a R6950 graphics card, and get extra shader processors enabled. That trick won't work here as this card is not reference. However, we do wonder a little what would happen if you'd flash an MSI R6970 Twin Frozr II BIOS into this product

source

i notice it's quite a bit smaller than yours, drew - here's old vs new:



notice the cobwebs on old card

Yeah it seems MSI took that BIOS tweak ability away

This is interesting......

Now one point we have to mention - with the first revision of the reference models you could flash in a R6970 BIOS into a R6950 graphics card, and get extra shader processors enabled. That trick won't work here as this card is not reference. However, we do wonder a little what would happen if you'd flash an MSI R6970 Twin Frozr II BIOS into this product

I wonder too....? Will have to look around the net to see if it's been done yet.

Anyway I'm glad I got the reference card with the dual BIOS.

Oh and I got you on it being the 2gig version. That's good.

Thanks.

mickey megabyte said:

i notice it's quite a bit smaller than yours, drew - here's old vs new:



notice the cobwebs on old card

Yeah, that is curious. Does it still take two 6-pin PCIe connectors?

You have a link to that card? - Duh...... Never mind.... you gave me a link

yes it's got two power connectors, at the side of the card, rather than back.

linky linky

i think the reference card would have been a tight squeeze in my case. (forgive the pun)

Yeah I just took a gandor at it. The specs are pretty much on par with the reference card all the way round, and as you noted, the extra 10MHz doesn't seem to add anything. Nice card though. Good.

Now all you have to do is run a few games through it to get the enjoyment out of it. I love mine, does what I need it to do, even without the BIOS tweak :)

my results are from a different benchmark.

i used the tropics demo (because it was a smaller download) - looks a bit crysis-y, with tropical beaches and palm trees.