AMD Radeon HD 6950 Can Be Unlocked To HD 6970 191
An anonymous reader writes "AMD's new Radeon HD 6950 can be unlocked to a HD 6970 via BIOS mod. Performance of the unlocked card is identical to the full blown HD 6970!"
HOLY MACRO!
It is still different HW (Score:5, Informative)
A lot of manufacturers will do this, actually. Their first device will contain very high quality, standard HW that is somewhat overspec for what they intend, but due to driver support and ease of implementation they can get it out the door in a reasonable amount of time. Then for their successor device they will take the lessons learned, use cheaper parts, use better optimized software, and sell it as the "cheaper" version.
You are getting lousier HW, but arguably better SW, so the performance gap isn't as big as their marketing lit will let on. On paper, the expensive first gen device looks better, but when the rubber hits the anus it's pretty much a wash.
Overclocking guide (Score:5, Informative)
Re:It is still different HW (Score:5, Informative)
9500/9700 all over again (Score:4, Informative)
It's about manufacturing yield... (Score:4, Informative)
So if I am a graphics chip manufacturer, I know that the fewer unique designs I have, the cheaper it will be to manufacture my product line. If I make both chips and boards, the same economy of scale applies to both the chips themselves and the assembled boards.
If I can determine both my chip and board yield at in-circuit test, and configure each manufactured device to its maximum possible stable capability, then my manufacturing product yield is maximized.
This type of yield binning is nothing new.
Re:Overclocking guide (Score:5, Informative)
Want to check this? Just use a 6-pin connector and short the remaining two pins on the GPU to ground to satisfy the GPU if it checks for a connection there and everything will work just peachy fine. If you check 8-pin PCIe connectors you'll see that this is all they do: short the two extra pins to ground.