Unlock Your Radeon HD 6950 To An HD 6970 Via Firmware Unlock

It has been common practice over the years to release GPUs and CPUs built on the same design only with some of the features disabled in order to lower the cost. A few weeks ago AMD released the Radeon HD 6970 and Radeon HD 6950 both cards where based on the same reference design, same chips and same base configuration. The difference, the HD 6950 was clocked down to an 800mhz GPU clock and 1250mhz memory clock with only 1408 unified shaders versus the HD 6970 which features a 880 GPU clock, 1375 memory clock and 1536 unified shaders.

According to a recent post over at TechPowerUp, with few basic steps and a few pieces of software the new Radeon HD 6950 can be unlocked and transformed to a Radeon HD 6970 by unlocking 128 unified shaders and overclocking your HD 6950.

Full instructions along with links for all the software you'll need are available here. Unlocking the additional shaders is done by flashing the card with an HD 6970 BIOS. Overclocking can be achieved with any of your favorite GPU clocking applications.

There is no guarantee that your card will overclock to the higher speeds or that your card will handle the unlocking correctly. However with AMD's new dual bios option that allows for easy recovery should something go wrong you really can't miss.