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AMD Radeon HD 6950 Can Be Unlocked To HD 6970

Posted by timothy on from the what-market-will-bear dept.

An anonymous reader writes "AMD's new Radeon HD 6950 can be unlocked to a HD 6970 via BIOS mod. Performance of the unlocked card is identical to the full blown HD 6970!"

4 of 191 comments (clear)

  1. If this by velja27 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    If people start to buy this kind of "locked" graphic cards and unlock them then the manufacturers will start to cripple the cards for good. Or simply make truly weaker graphic cards instead of limited ones with the same chipset.

    1. Re:If this by Zakabog · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Luckily, they can't control what we do.

      That's his point, they can control what we do. If we hack their hardware to run better with simple software solutions then they'll just redesign the hardware so there's a physical restriction on how well the card will perform. Though there would be no point in being able to hack the device if you're too afraid to do it for fear that they might cripple future devices.

  2. 3.5" floppies by bonniot · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Reminds me how the way drives recognized 1.44MB floppies (3.5") from 720KB ones was by checking if there was a hole in the bottom-right corner (the bottom-left corner being for write protection). And sure enough, if you made a hole in a 720KB floppy it would be possible to format it as 1.44. There might have been a few more errors, but I remember when HD floppies were 3-4 times more expensive, so it was definitely worth it. At least for a teenager with only pocket money. Ah, those floppy drilling afternoons... Mais où sont les neiges d'antan?

    --
    Watch great movie opening scenes!
  3. Re:It's about manufacturing yield... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Except you're wrong about how parts are binned. It's generally not so much about yield binning, and more about market segments, 10% of the market will buy the best part for twice the price, 80% will buy whatever is best value for money, and the last 10% will buy whatever is cheapest (percentages made up), the trouble is when you are in the business of semiconductor manufacture, and you have tweaked your process to 99.98% yield with 0.02% tolerances, over 80% of the parts coming off the line are topend parts, just about your entire cost of manufacture is in plant capital, and 90% of your profit comes from the top 10% units. You basically have to create an artificial lowend to create a highend market. Generally it makes more sense to fuse parts to lower spec, as softmods basically ruin sales of topend devices.

    Environmentally friendly, fuck no. Required business practise, almost certainly.

    It also doesn't make a lot of environmental sense to mass-produce parts which are obsolete in 6 months, it would be better from that perspective to develop semiconductor fabs until they reached their natural atomic-resolution limits, and then produce parts that are as good as they practically can be. But that would again completely canabalise their business and they'd go bust. It would also be a disaster for everyone who needs more computing power right now, and the results of that would probably be much worse than the silicon waste we have now (which is mostly energy and gold, as silicon, copper and boron are abundant and cheap).