Asus 6950 DCUII flash to 6970

Hello, i would like to ask about the Asus 6950 DCUII . I read in various threads that this GPU does in fact have dual bios, but the bios is for another use. Some people said that it is possible to put 6970 bios on this gpu, and that it will work, but i would still need to overclock the shaders.

Does anyone know anything for certain?

System Specs
i7 920
rampage 2 extreme
xfx pro 550 psu

It can be, but I would do more research:

Info & 6970 bios collection

Unlocking the shaders is a hit or a miss tho depending on the card. Be advised if the bios flash goes wrong, you will have a dead card.

Since it has dual bios, would it not be possible to use bios 2 and reset bios 1? Isn't that what they did?

Also, at what kind of performance increase am i looking at?

Would you suggest a bios flash or perhaps just an OC would be enough? Since the gpu has a really good cooler.

You'll get a decent performance gain with a 6970 from a 6950 because:

A) Higher clock speed
B) Unlocked shaders

You flash primary bios ( switch in #1 position). You cannot flash secondary bios as it's locked and will not allow it. If you are a bit concerned about flashing the bios, it's better not to. Your best bet would just be to overclock the card using MSI Afterburner instead. It's alot safer than flashing the bios.

Flashing the bios is risky. I would not do it if If I wasn't comfortable flashing it.

You can flash both bioses. One bios is designed for dl-dvi and the other is sldvi. So one bios is dl,sl, 3x displayports. The other bios is sl, sl, 4x dp.

I could never get the 6970 dual link bios working on my 6950s but the single link bios worked fine. To use dual link I had to extract the 6950 dual link bios and run an u locker tool on it to open the shaders but it kept 6950 clocks and voltages.

At the time you could not overvolt those cards without using gputweak which I couldn't ever get to work right. Not with any bios, not even with clean install of Windows. Gputweak refused to accept I had asus cards. Dont know if that situation is changed now.

Im getting mixed signals so i do not know how to proceed. Any tips if i just went for a moderate overclock?

I've never done an OC on a GPU.

Well, i owned 2 of those cards in crossfire so im speaking from personal experience. I flashed both bioses, i ran the bios unlocker for shaders, i tested the 6970 bioses for both the single link and dual link switch position.. If you have working voltage control then you can try just overclocking and see where you get. Most of the advantage of running the 6970 bios for me was that it had a higher default voltage so i could clock higher. But these days asus gpu tweak isnt an abomination of a program that borders on non functionality like it was a few years back.

If you arent comfortable flashing the bios your best bet is to download gputweak and see how it does. The dcuII cooler was fantastic for me, in a single card setup. In crossfire the top one ran way too hot and way too loud but that is to be expected with dual cards.

So i should not use msi afterburner?

Afterburner should be fine to use for that card. If it doesn't give you full control (check settings in afterburner for voltage controls & extending the default overclocking limits) then try gputweak.

I remember one of the issues with flashing 6950's was that the early 6970 ASUS BIOS' that were used ran the VRAM at higher voltages or messed with the timings or something, so eventually modded 6950 BIOS files were released that only unlocked the shaders. Still have an unlocked XFX 6950 with a shaders-only BIOS that's working fine. If your card is relatively new though then it's less likely to unlock, as they eventually began fusing them so BIOS mods stopped working.

When I owned them afterburner did not offer voltage control. You had to use gputweak for it. And this was after afterburner had been updated for the newly released 7970 so it wasn't like they were still new cards.