Simple BIOS Flash Turns AMD Radeon HD 6950 Into A 6970!

Again, this font doesn’t have an apostrophe.

Did Santa give you an AMD Radeon HD 6950 this year? Good news: he actually gave you a 6970! It turns out that with a few clicks of your mouse you can unlock your 6950 so that it runs at 6970 speeds. Nice!

This “mod” (I guess you can call it a mod, but you’re merely re-flashing the card’s BIOS) seems to work on all 6950 models out there. That is, cards from AMD itself, from Asus, from Sapphire, from XFX, etc. You don’t need to go out of your way to find an esoteric brand—they all work!

So how does this work, hmm?

Again, it’s just a simple BIOS re-flash, and techPowerUp has put together a few scripts to make the process even easier than it already is.

The Radeon HD 6970, which is currently AMD’s top-of-the-line single-GPU card (the dual-GPU 5970 is faster), can currently be had on Newegg for right around $360-$370. That’s already an insane deal when you consider how much power you’re buying, but the 6950 is currently around $300.

In other words, you can have the power of a $370 card for the price of a $300 card.

Just for comparison’s sake, Nvidia’s top-of-the-line single-GPU card, the GTX 580, is currently around $530 on Newegg. Considering the 6970 (or, apparently, a properly unlocked 6950!) is just as powerful, if not slightly more powerful, well, there’s never been a better day to build a gaming PC.

Now if AMD would just pump out proper drivers every once in a while everything would be super!