Looks like a very nice card. Ive seen a few 6950's being "unlocked" to 6970's is that really the case?
Yep, I've seen quite a few things recently about people reflashing the BIOS's to higher cards... must admit I haven't seen it as much with NVIDIA cards. Presumably it would screw your warranty over though, so probably best to get a used card to experiment with
Mhmm good idea. Im going to do alot of thinking soon and decide, a new card is up on my list with a SSD
Main issue on the 6950's is the majority of these boards only have the two PCIe 6 ports, the 6970 has a 6 and 6+2PCIe as the core draws a bit more V's i think its about 0.75V more which is the main issue holding a stable voltage increase on the two PCIe 6's is quite hard when as it will affect the RAM etc. That and the GDDR5 isnt rated at the same speed as the real 6970s. Most people just flash it for the shaders anyway as its not overly stable with a full BIOS flash.
i have MSI N560GTX-Ti Twin Frozr II 2GD5/OC can be overclocked like mad which I got from here: http://www.scan.co.uk/products/2gb-...pu-880mhz-shader-1760mhz-384-cores-plus-bf3-g
If you go the 6950 route stay away from flashing it to a 6970, taking that risk for an extra 2-3fps isn't worth it really. you'd be better of just buying a better card. I didn't bother flashing the shader's since most people only gained 1-2 extra fps
I'm playing BF3 on a single 6870 at 1920x1080 on high. Looks great, plays very smoothly. I never notice the frame rate, but MSI Afterburner tells me it's somewhere between 40-50fps on average.
The only reason you'd need to pump an extra 0.75v through an unlocked 6950 is if you where trying to push very high clocks, equivalent to the real 6970s. I have mine running at 890/1375 @ 1.174v and it's perfectly stable I did try for MSI 6970 lightening speeds, but I do believe that the card struggled without the extra power inputs
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Asus-GeForc...R8DA/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1326034388&sr=8-1 Asus's 560ti for a very good price. As good as the Hawk, I wager. Friend of mine bought one, I literally took it out of the box (building his PC for him) and put it to 950MHz in AfterBurner w/o any voltage tweaking. Stable in Furmark for 30mins. Cooler's great, keeps it cool and quiet. And he has the BF3 OC issues. Has to turn off the OC on BF3 otherwise his screen blacks out for about 1-2 seconds every 15 mins or so.
