After endless searching and seeing a lot of no's around I found a possible yes. I have a Msi 6950 Twin Frozr II not pre OC. It has no dual bios switch. Techpowerup says in its reveiw of the OC edition that they could not mod it into the 6970. Reveiw here http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/M...ozr_II/32.html. Way down in the very last post in the comments I found someone claiming to be able to with a different method than flashing 6970 bios on it here http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/31...tions#t2368661. Bystander shows in his step by step instructions how to unlock the shaders and, if it fails, restore it to original condition. He has people saying it is possible, and others saying it is not in his comments. So has anyone done this? If I were to try this could I really restore it how he says? Does it sound plausible? Is there anyway to enable the shaders for this card?
If I remember correctly, the say that the old revision 6950s were all fully unlock-able, but the newer models (rev2) don't have this function anymore. Just be sure to back up your original BIOS if it doesn't work I was able to instantly unlock my first 6950 easily, but I'm not too sure if non-reference designs also allow this, since they have their own PCB and design.
tom's hardware? I wouldn't be so sure of someone posting something like this on there, basically I would try and find a dual bios 6950, unless you already have one of these cards, in which case leave it, because if it goes wrong you will completely brick the card, and just end up having a very large paper weight on your desk, trust me, its a very painful experience.
TBH the boost from merely unlocking the HD6950 is relatively small (Yes I have tested this). I would spend more time getting the best overclock you can out of it rather than risking an unlock that possibly won't work (given the success rate of non reference card unlocks). I should close this out with saying that I own a Rev 1 reference Asus HD6950 that is unlocked. If it hadn't of been for the price (£200 all in brand new from Ebuyer) I would have got a MSI TFIII and clocked it.
My opinion as well, personally without the dual-BIOS I wouldn't. And I wouldn't trust Tom's Hardware either lol.
