ClayMeow Posted August 21, 2011 Posted August 21, 2011 hey airman, GREAT review and it actually led to me purchasing this GPU...got it in the mail yesterday my questions: for the 6970 unlock, all you did was shut down the computer, change the physical switch on the card itself, and reboot? did you have to do anything else to unlock the extra shaders? also, when you said you overclocked it to a "core clock of 1010 MHz and a memory clock of 1500 MHz," are those numbers STABLE? or will it hurt the life of the card in the long-run? sorry if these are n00b questions but the last time i built a desktop was 7+ years ago...haha. i'd greatly appreciate any feedback! you have to actually FLASH the BIOS to the 6970 to unlock it...the physical switch simply means you can have two BIOS' in case one fails. Mike can speak more to the exact process. As for overclocking, yes, in theory any time you overclock anything, you're putting more stress on the said component. That being said, unless you're really running super hot temps where you're frying it, most people replace said components long before the life of the product ends. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
OrangeBunnies Posted August 22, 2011 Posted August 22, 2011 (edited) you have to actually FLASH the BIOS to the 6970 to unlock it...the physical switch simply means you can have two BIOS' in case one fails. Mike can speak more to the exact process. Hey I'm new here sorry to just jump in, but I read your review, great review by the way, it convinced me to go out and buy the card and am quite happy with it, especially since the shaders unlocked when I hit the BIOS switch, but I'm having problems with the card and I don't think the shaders are actually doing their job properly. After hitting the bios switch, TRIXX and GPUZ both showed 1536 shaders, but when I played bad company 2 and left4dead 2 and looked at the same locations I was actually getting less FPS after unlocking the shaders via the BIOS switch, benchmarks also yielded similar results. Any idea why this is occurring? May I ask what 6970 BIOS you guys used exactly when flashing the card. I solved the problem I was having, it was just the PowerTune setting in CCC reducing the wattage, silly me Edited August 22, 2011 by OrangeBunnies Share this post Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
airman Posted August 22, 2011 Posted August 22, 2011 Okay, Bosco alerted me to this and I hopped on to check it out, and I'm glad that you figured out the problem! I did some digging and saw that some boards may not have the same registers/memory, they may not respond well to the slightly higher voltage from the 6970 BIOS. Not sure if that's completely true or not but it make a little bit of sense. Cheers, again glad to know it worked out for you! I'll have to keep that in mind if anyone else runs across that problem. I pretty much disable all of that power-saving stuff by default, so that's probably why I didn't run across that problem. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
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