Get Radeon HD 6970 for Price of HD 6950 Via Firmware Unlock

From DailyTech: Graphics card maker NVIDIA was infamous for frequently selling identical hardware in its GeForce (consumer) and Quadro (commercial) lineups, while charging 2-5 times more for Quadros. It didn't take long for some clever users to figure out how to soft mod certain cards to remove the restrictions preventing Quadro driver use on GeForce cards.

Now similar news has broke regarding a new model of graphics card from Advanced Micro Devices (AMD). According to TechPowerUp, the new Radeon HD 6950 can be transformed to a Radeon HD 6970, unlocking 128 unified shaders in the process.

Full instructions are available here -- but the process looks like it should be pretty easy, at least on some cards.

AMD's ATI unit has a long history of disabling shaders to differentiate similar models in its lineup, dating back to at least the Radeon 9500 in 2002. However, typically shaders were disabled by on-die fuses, making it virtually impossible to reenable them.

Strangely, AMD appears to be shipping its commercially available Radeon HD 69x0 series cards with shaders disabled, not by fuses, but by changes in the VGA BIOS. This technique has typically been used in the past only for engineering-sample and demo cards.

According to the unlockers, Radeon HD 6950 cards from Club3D, XFX, Sapphire, PowerCooler, ASUS, HIS, and AMD, all were able to be upgraded via the firmware unlock. Note, cards from Diamond, Visiontek, and Gigabyte were not mentioned in the report. They may work -- or may not.

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