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Sapphire 6850 BIOS Flash

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byrdawg

Member
Joined
Feb 13, 2011
Location
Tx
I have never messed with a GPU Bios before or GPU OC'ing and was hoping to get some info from someone with hands on experience.
I saw in a post on [Hard]Forum that you can get a 6870 Sapphire BIOS and flash it on 6850's from techpowerup.com. From what I have gathered researching this is that 6850's are capable of some pretty good OC'ing, and that CCC isn't exactly the "Bees Knees". I have not had much success with even a minor boost of an OC to these cards with CCC without BSODS.
My questions....
1) Are these BONAFIDE ATi BIOS, or some hack.
2) Where did they get them from, and why can I not download updated BIOS from ATi directly.
3) I know the whole "unlock the extra shaders" doesn't work, but the 6850 will run at stock 6870 speeds. Will I need aftermarket GPU cooling?
4) Will flashing my TWO 6850's with a 6870 BIOS make my Crossfire setup unstable?
5) Is it possible that this "BIOS OC" will be much more stable than CCC tweaking?

Thx, and feel free to add any suggestions/info as I am treading new waters here.
 
You are thinking of the 6950 to 6970 flash. The same cannot be done on the 6850. However, you can overclock it to achieve performance close to the 6870 in some games. Still the 6850 is not the 6870 underclocked.
 
I am not expecting to unlock it into a 6870 - just trick it so that the 6850's think they are 6870's. Therefore OC'ing them to stock 6870 speeds as the guy in the post I linked above did. As you said...
However, you can overclock it to achieve performance close to the 6870 in some games.
When I use the latest version of CCC to OC even a little (no where close to a 6870) I get BSODs as soon as I hit "APPLY". I was hoping that it may be issues with CCC software OC, and by going the other route would be much more effiecient and stable.
 
Well I do not know. I have the Asus and as the second post said I have had 1000/1250 with my Asus, It obviously must be the vendor's bios. IS your Sapphire locked to 850/1200 like the Gigabyte one?
 
I tried a different search query and found why I can't OC. It's a registry value that is - as I am understanding it - like a hibernate/sleep mode for GPU's that are in Xfire. When disabling this both GPU's are active all the time. After I have disabled this I have been having a lot better luck OC'ing these cards through CCC. The post I came across is here if anyone else is have problems OC'ing multiple linked GPU's. The thread is a bit lengthy. I just paid attention to the first post.

Thank you for your attention, jstutman.
 
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