How to Unlock an AMD Radeon HD 6950 to an 6970 Easily

I purchased an XFX Radeon HD 6950 (2GB) video card a few months ago in preparation for all the triple-a titles that have come out in the last year; while I miss the PhysX support for the occasional game that supports it, I’ve been mostly happy.

Shortly after the dual-launch of both the 6950 and 6970 Radeon HD cards, I heard that the 6950 was actually the 6970 silicon with a BIOS lock in-place shutting off a handful of shaders manually.

A few smart people quickly found an unlock for the 6950s, allowing it to perform just like the more expensive 6970s.

I am not generally a fan of unlocking; I like to avoid pain and inconvenience and try and keep all my devices/software/etc. running exactly as intended. In this case I ignored trying the 6950 unlock until today due to some lack-luster performance I was seeing in some newer games (Batman Arkham City DX11, The Witcher 2 to name a few).

Since I found a dead-easy way to do this, I figured I would link it all here for you to make your life easier.

How to Unlock the Radeon HD 6950 to a 6970

1. Download the latest GPU-Z - This program will be used to save your current BIOS to disk and verify that the unlock worked.
2. Download ATI Winflash - This program will be used to flash the modified (unlocked) BIOS back to your video card when ready.
3. Download this simple BIOS-modification script - This script will run against your saved BIOS and unlock it.

Now that you have all the software downloaded, do the following steps:

1. Unzip the BIOS modification script from Step #3 above into its own directory. For example, C:\radeon-bios-mod or something like that. We unzip this now because we want to save the BIOS from the next few steps to this directory to make modding the BIOS easier.
2. Run GPU-Z, take note of the following field values (write them down if you want). These values will be increased after our unlock is done:
• Shaders
• Pixel Fillrate
• Texture Fillrate
3. With GPU-Z still running, click the “Save BIOS” button, it is somewhat hidden in the middle-right of the interface:
4. Click Save to file… and save the BIOS to the directory you created in Step #1, but be sure to name it original.bin; the reason for this is because the BIOS mod script is hard-coded to look for a file called “original.bin” as its input. This just makes life easier.
5. Now you can close GPU-Z.
6. Go into the directory you created in Step #1 (where you unzipped the BIOS mod script and just saved the BIOS). Run the run.bat file, this will execute the PHP script and modify the BIOS you saved as original.bin. The script will write the modified BIOS out as modded.bin; this is the BIOS you will want to flash back to your video card.
7. Now unzip ATI Winflash into its own directory.
8. Run ATI Winflash as Administrator:
9. Once ATI Winflash is loaded, click Load Image and select the modded.bin modified BIOS that the script just created for us in the previous step:
10. Before flashing the modified BIOS back to your card, be aware that after this next step completes your computer may lockup (or at least the video seems to). You may need to hit the RESET button after this next step completes, so close and safe any unfinished work now.
    Once loaded, click the Program button to upload the BIOS to your video card:
11. After the BIOS is flashed, re-run GPU-Z and confirm that the Shaders, Pixel Fillrate and Texture Fillrate values have all increased:

Now you can enjoy your unlocked card!

Troubleshooting

The original TechPowerup article on doing this unlock talked about making sure the “BIOS switch” found on the physical card is in a certain position; using my XFX Radeon HD 6950 I didn’t have to change anything, so there is a good chance this guide works for you out of the box without issue.