AMD Radeon HD 6950 Can Be Unlocked To HD 6970

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!"

Comments

It is still different HW

[BadAnalogyGuy]

A lot of manufacturers will do this, actually. Their first device will contain very high quality, standard HW that is somewhat overspec for what they intend, but due to driver support and ease of implementation they can get it out the door in a reasonable amount of time. Then for their successor device they will take the lessons learned, use cheaper parts, use better optimized software, and sell it as the "cheaper" version.

You are getting lousier HW, but arguably better SW, so the performance gap isn't as big as their marketing lit will let on. On paper, the expensive first gen device looks better, but when the rubber hits the anus it's pretty much a wash.

Re:It is still different HW

[ZDRuX]

"...but when the rubber hits the anus it's pretty much a wash."

I was like whaa....? But then I looked at your name and all was set right in the universe.

Re:It is still different HW

[SuricouRaven]

Or perhaps they turned it off because, while it works almost all the time, it'll fail one in ten million floating point operations at random, or is prone to fail at moderatly high temperatures or workloads. If you want to use the 'disabled' core, I suggest you run your own tests to determine if there is some minor fault. Slow the fans so it runs hot and calculate pi. If it can run for 24 hours and produce the right result, it's probably good.

Re:It is still different HW

[Lord Byron II]

Just to reply to the parents: -Just because you run the system for 6/12/18 months without a crash does not mean its stable. Most apps won't crash if 1+1=1.9999. You're not likely to notice if a single pixel in a single frame in a YouTube video is the wrong color. -Just because your system is stable, then has a crash doesn't mean that the silicon is degrading. Even a "perfect" chip will have a fault or two every few 10^x calculations (where x is some large number).

Re:It is still different HW

[Kreigaffe]

An image of Steve Jobs hovering precariously atop the production line, straddling the birth tube of his empire, a smile on his face as he hunkers down and lets the conveyor belt drag each and every item ever so gently under his balls for the Reality-Distortion-Teabag.

If this

[velja27]

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.

Re:If this

[hellop2]

So, what's your point? Don't hack hardware?

We can't control what they do. Luckily, they can't control what we do.

Re:If this

[Zakabog]

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.

Re:If this

[antifoidulus]

Ultimately it depends on how much they actually (think) they end up losing. The reason they ship the same hardware to begin with is because it obviously costs them more to set up separate lines for the two cards than it does for them to put the extra bit unused hardware in the lower spec'd card. If ultimately they think that doing this will cost them more in lost sales than they gain in increased manufacturing efficiency then they will start shipping divergent hardware, but if only a tiny portion of their customer base mods their cards then they will probably just consider it collateral damage and maybe up the difficulty of modding the software in the next version.

O! the Humanity!

[jabberw0k]

If people start buying underclocked CPUs and overclocking them, the manufacturers will start to cripple the CPUs for good, or make weaker CPUs... Wait, haven't we been down that road before?

Overclocking guide

[nicholas22]

An overclocking guide can be found here. You *might* get problems under extreme load, because the 6950 uses the 6-pin power connector, whereas the 6970 can draw more power, because it uses the 9-pin connector.

Re:Overclocking guide

[Elledan]

That's not correct. The 6 and 8-pin PCIe connectors are identical. They have the same number of ground and 12V wires between the GPU and the PSU, the same wire gauge and can carry the same amount of power. The 8-pin connector exists because in the PCIe spec they had a sense wire for the 12V line specified on this connector, which would then allow the connector to carry more current as the PSU would be able to better regulate the voltage. In practice this is much more easily done at the PSU side, making the 8-pin connector useless and allows the 6-pin connector to carry the same 150 Watt as the 8-pin one.

Want to check this? Just use a 6-pin connector and short the remaining two pins on the GPU to ground to satisfy the GPU if it checks for a connection there and everything will work just peachy fine. If you check 8-pin PCIe connectors you'll see that this is all they do: short the two extra pins to ground.

9500/9700 all over again

[lostmongoose]

same thing was possible with the 9550 Pro -> 9700 and with the 9700 -> 9700 Pro both were done with BIOS flashing

6950 -- 6970

[dangitman]

So, that's 20 faster?

Re:6950 -- 6970

[TeknoHog]

It's only 0.29 % faster, probably not worth it.

3.5" floppies

[bonniot]

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?

bad for the environment

[Anonymous Coward]

Welcome to the world of "economy of scale". You may also be interested to see how routers are sold/marketed. (see: dlink, linksys and motorola, etc)

The interesting part is NOT why this can be, but rather whether it is legal and also how the bios code was extracted. This is why consumers should demand more "open hardware". Because consumers are consistently paying for the manufacturing of quality hardware only to have the manufacturer bundle crap software (cripple ware) onto it. And for what? so they can target various price points within their target markets.

Question: do you think this is an environmentally sound practice? It isn't very "green" to sell a physical product to the consumer only to restrict its usage to some lesser subset of its full potential. I don't understand why the geeky tree huggers among us don't get on this and start demanding more and longer functionality out of the products we consume. ex: I have access to 4 cannon cameras that look much the same, are the same age and yet all the batteries and chargers are incompatible. Why? so i cannot reuse batteries or charges and must trash and re-buy each individually. With other products I cannot charge everything thru USB even when it is possible. Why? for additional after market adapter sales. I have routers that are exact same hardware yet function and priced quite differently. why? do i have to tell you. I have portable devices that have rechargable AA batteries taped into a pack with a unique plug, instead of just using a regular AA slot. Why? i think you know. Cell phone pricing/plans/contracts/packages are designed to encourage me to "revolve" phones every year or so... why? its too obvious to say.

We consumers are being forced to make additional garbage for the landfills and discouraged from thinking about the consequences when we really could squeeze much more life from our existing electronics. We should be outraged (those that care for the future). But instead we are lulled into the belief that our existing equipment is crap and that getting something new benefits us. We are convinced that we are the ones demanding this from the manufactures. I tell you it is the other way. In reality this only benefits the manufacturer... who is actively limiting the functionality of our beloved products to further this fallacy to maximise their profits.

What you can do when possible (if you care): Buy generic brand electronics, use open source and demand refunds for bundled software when possible. Note that Windows is always refundable when sold with a computer... read the contract... if you care to read contracts before accepting them. ie: keep the quality computer hardware, but drop the cripple wear (windows 7 starter).d

It's about manufacturing yield...

[EmagGeek]

So if I am a graphics chip manufacturer, I know that the fewer unique designs I have, the cheaper it will be to manufacture my product line. If I make both chips and boards, the same economy of scale applies to both the chips themselves and the assembled boards.

If I can determine both my chip and board yield at in-circuit test, and configure each manufactured device to its maximum possible stable capability, then my manufacturing product yield is maximized.

This type of yield binning is nothing new.

3 words for you

[thegarbz]

I got 3 words for you. Economies of scale.

It underpins the manufacturing of all processors currently out there. What is being done here is nothing new. It's as old as overclocking. Some manufactures tried various ways of locking them. Ultimately though once you customise a chip enough it adds to the bottom line production cost. That's why AMD's version of hardware locking at the time included setting 5 jumpers external to the CPU die and then laser cutting them. Remember the pencil trick to get Athlons unlocked?

Creating a truly weaker card means customised production runs, which means setup costs for the batch. Not something you want when margins are next to nothing.