6000 to buy?

hi i have a 5750 and 5770 in crossfire and frankly i'm disappointed in the results.sometimes i even get lower fps.
if i buy a 6850 and flash it to 6870 will it be more powerful or my specs are better?

Do you mean buy a 6950 and flash it to the 6970 bios? If so then yes, it will give you a better GPU set up.

It is not recommended to flash to the 6970 BIOS.

Just a nickname said:

It is not recommended to flash to the 6970 BIOS.

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Source?

ratbuddy said:

Source?

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I can't provide a link but have seen at least one website that is keeping track of flashed 6950 failures trying to determine the actual cause. It appears that it could be that they have different ram timings or higher voltage demands but nothing is certain yet. Only thing for sure is that there have been failures after flashing and they recommend unlocking shaders only for now.

shadowdr said:

I can't provide a link but have seen at least one website that is keeping track of flashed 6950 failures trying to determine the actual cause. It appears that it could be that they have different ram timings or higher voltage demands but nothing is certain yet. Only thing for sure is that there have been failures after flashing and they recommend unlocking shaders only for now.

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I'm pretty sure that's only true for the lower end cards?
Also doesn't every 69xx card have a dual BIOS so you can just flip back to the original if something goes wrong?

I think all of the 6900 series has the dual bios feature.

http://www.techimo.com/forum/graphics-cards-displays/255792-6950-6970-flash-info.html

bda1967 said:

I think all of the 6900 series has the dual bios feature.

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It's not a real dual BIOS feature (see link above).

There is also a topic to report performance lose over time after flashing to 6970.

The theory is that the voltage change in the BIOS could be physically different as the cards have different resistors. Because the 6950 has weaker components than the 6970, the extra stress on the board could be too much for these components (mainly thinking at the memory). So if I was an owner of 6950, I'd rather wait and see what is really causing the problem until flashing to 6970.

ratbuddy said:

Source?

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See this too:
http://www.overclock.net/ati/919230-6950-flash-reported-damage.html

TBH if i can get the unlocked shaders and same clock speed using a modded 6950 bios i'd rather do that

I would either get the 6950 and leave it alone or just get the 6970 and be done with it. I chose the latter of the two personally. I didn't see anything about them not having two bios settings from the article though. Switch posion 1 for the unlocked bios and switch position 2 for the locked one. I'm afraid of bricking an expensive video card.

Ahh, so long story short, unlock shaders on 6950 all you want, just don't flash to 6970 BIOS.

ratbuddy said:

Ahh, so long story short, unlock shaders on 6950 all you want, just don't flash to 6970 BIOS.

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Basically. I mean I used 6970 bios and I have no issues. But its better safe than sorry I suppose.

mohsentux2 said:

hi i have a 5750 and 5770 in crossfire and frankly i'm disappointed in the results.sometimes i even get lower fps.
if i buy a 6850 and flash it to 6870 will it be more powerful or my specs are better?

Click to expand...

CF should really be used with matched cards... You're limiting your faster card to the speed of the slower one. Which games are you playing, in that you see a lower fps? And by lower fps, do you mean lower than when you're running the single 5770?? If it happens to be WoW, then that is just a game that is poorly coded for multiple graphics cards.. and you'll have to either deal with it, or get a faster single card.

A 6850 cannot be flashed to a 6870, but you can OC the 6850 to the 6870's stock level and get a great performance boost out of it. Or you can grab a 6870 and OC that too, which should end up pulling ahead of the 6850 by a bit. A single 6870 should beat the 2 cards you have in CF now.

The card which you can flash, is actually the 6950. It's all over the forums here, and you can flash it to a 6970, which unlocks the additional shader cores, and allows you more OC headroom.

My vote would be to grab a 6850 and OC it, or if budget allows for it.. grab the 6950 and try flashing or since I'm now all of a sudden hearing that flashing it is bad, at least try to unlock the extra shader cores, however that's done.

Either a 6850/6870 will be nice, course think the 6950 1Gig version is really close to the price of a 6870.

At least the 2Gig 6950's you can flash them. By flashing them I mean, taking your bios on the card, running the shader unlock and flashing it back to the card. NOT taking the 6970 bios. Key difference is timings (at least thought) and ram voltage (1.5V for 6950 and 1.6V for 6970). I can say im happy to run at 900/1400 easily on the defualt 1.1V of the 6950, saves a few watts compared to running at 1.175V like the 6970. As well opens up some more OCing headroom with voltage controls if the temp is nice on the card.