New card, is it a 6950 or 6970?

[alachua]

So, I recently picked up a used graphics card and there is some murkiness regarding if it is a 6970 or 6950 that has been reflashed.

Here is the GPU-z screen shot:

Supposedly, the device ID cannot be changed. Thus, this shows it is a 6970. However, it only has 2x6 pin power inputs. I attempted to flip the bios switch to the #2 position and see what happened, however when I did the system booted without any output on my three monitors. Also, there is a chance the card is an early development sample.

So what do you guys think?

 

[RussianSensation]

As a reference design card, the HD6970 has 6+8 pin power.

It looks like your card is a flashed 6950 to 6970 specs. The user flashed the memory to 1375 too which is generally not the safest route. Also suspect is the 750 mhz clock speed.

What about the front of the card? Usually it says a 6950/6970 on it.

Did you run MSI Kombustor to test for stability? Download MSI Afterburner and check the stock GPU voltage. I believe the stock voltage on a HD6950 is 1100mV while it is 1175mV on the 6970.

Getting a working 6950 that flashed successfully into a 6970 isn't a bad deal as long as you didn't pay 6970 price for it.

 

[notty22]

It seems to show a early (release) date on that sticker. It looks like a reviewers standard AMD reference card. Except there is no back-plate either. Which I believe the first shipping reference cards 6950-70 had.

 

[alachua]

So, I cannot get MSI Afterburner to show my voltage, but GPU-Z is reporting it to be pretty high:

It is also Idling pretty warm (room is about 68f (20c) and my cpu is idling about 27-30c).

I've also run into some odd issues. In F1 2010, if I attempt to turn post processing or reflections to 'Ultra' it crashes the game.

 

[Silverforce11]

Definitely something weird with your card, idle clock speed is way too high. Looks like a bad flash to 6970. Get a 6950 bios and flash it back.

 

[RussianSensation]

So, I cannot get MSI Afterburner to show my voltage, but GPU-Z is reporting it to be pretty high:

It is also Idling pretty warm (room is about 68f (20c) and my cpu is idling about 27-30c).
.

Those are extremely high temperatures. Your card should downclock to 250mhz on the GPU and 150mhz on the memory in 2D. Also, my voltage drops to only 1.15V in idle.

You might want to start reading this guide and try flashing this card.

Your card may also be crashing if you didn't raise the power limit in the control panel. Up the power limit in Catalyst Control Center by +20%.

 

[alachua]

Those are extremely high temperatures. Your card should downclock to 250mhz on the GPU and 150mhz on the memory in 2D. Also, my voltage drops to only 1.15V in idle.

You might want to start reading this guide and try flashing this card.

Your card may also be crashing if you didn't raise the power limit in the control panel. Up the power limit in Catalyst Control Center by +20%.

Thanks for the feedback, I appreciate it.

Any suggestions on the fact that the BIOS switch in the #2 position makes the card not output video (maybe not even being detected?). I had 3 monitors hooked to it, both a dual and single link dvi and an ATI approved minidisplay port to single link dvi adapter. Windows booted, heard the start noise, but i had nothing on any of the outputs, even after unplugging and replugging the minidisplay port in.

 

[Jules]

You using Firefox with flash? I get the samething sometimes

 

[alachua]

You using Firefox with flash? I get the same ting sometimes

Nope, migrated to Chrome when I was experiencing system hangs with Firefox and my old Corsair Force3 SSD. I have some sidebar apps, including Pandora which is flash based, but the sidebar is essentially the same as IE.

 

[Jules]

Nope, migrated to Chrome when I was experiencing system hangs with Firefox and my old Corsair Force3 SSD. I have some sidebar apps, including Pandora which is flash based, but the sidebar is essentially the same as IE.

I think flash usually does it. I also noticed youtube also does it if its in the background.

 

[ghost recon88]

Definitely looks like an engineering sample card. You can see under where the market blacked it out the words engineering sample. Hope you didn't pay much for that card. Looks like it was flashed with the Asus TOP BIOS to unlock it.

 

[OILFIELDTRASH]

Can you get a refund? Unless you got this card really cheap I'd return it.

 

[Shmee]

curious. How much did you get it for?

 

[Ryan Smith]

Humm, how interesting.

I just checked my AMD samples; none of my cards match what you have. The 2GB 6900s we received have backplates and don't have AMD engineering stickers. The only 6900 I have with an engineering sticker is the 6950 1GB, and that has a date of 08/25/2010, a week newer than the card you have. I can't read the revision number under the black ink, though it looks like 09, which would match the card I have.

At the very least it's an engineering sample, that much is clear. It's not a card you should have; whether it's a reviewer that let it go or a hardware partner that sent it out (perhaps as an RMA) is impossible to say though. AMD should know more based on the S/N. But I'd say it's definitely possible it's an early dev sample(i.e. not the final design), considering it's older than the cards sent out to reviewers.

In any case that's definitely a 6950, as RussianSensation has already noted the 2x6pin power socket configuration is for a lower powered card. What I find particularly interesting though is that it doesn't boot up when using BIOS 2. BIOS 2 is supposed to be locked and I'm not immediately aware of any way to write to it. So I can't imagine why it would be corrupt or otherwise unbootable unless it left the factory like that (which lends more credit to a pre-final sample; BIOS 2 would not be necessary during development). It may be worth dumping BIOS 2 just to see what's in it, as the shipping 6950 BIOS was 113-C2160100-105.

All the advice you've been given is the right advice. If you flashed that back to a stock 6950 it would likely work correctly. However that won't change the fact that whoever sold you the card defrauded you, as it's definitely not a 6970.

 

[jacktesterson]

Its a 6950

 

[m3t4lh34d]

It is NOT a 6950. I flashed the BIOS to the ASUS TOP BIOS attempting to unlock the voltage tweak feature, NOT because it was a 6950. I still have the original 6970 BIOS that it came with.

The BIOS with which I used was not the ASUS TOP BIOS, it was in fact the ASUS Voltage Tweak Bios from my 6950 2GB w/shaders unlocked via RBE. I threw that BIOS on that card in the hopes to unlock it's voltage tweak capabilities, but it seems that the 6970 had a unique set of Vregs and was incompatible with any voltage tweaking software, so the only way to change the voltage was via directly flashing the gpu registers.

This card IS and always WILL be a 6970, regardless. There is NO way that I can find that a Device ID on a 6950 can be changed to a 6970. There have been numerous threads that I've read recently of people trying to change Device IDs on their cards, and failing via a simple bios flash. Just simply flashing a 6970 BIOS onto a 6950, does NOT change the Device ID. AMD did this for a reason. To force vendors to submit their BIOS samples for approval before they were permitted for use on a card. To my knowledge, AMD solely has the ability to change the Device ID from the factory, as it is held in ROM. Test it for yourself, I have...
Flash a 6950 2GB to a full 6970 BIOS and you'll notice the Device ID remains the same.

He got the card for $240.
I've recently sold FOUR 6970s and ONE 6950 2GB Voltage Tweak (which the BIOS originated from)

I sold each 6970 for 260-280 each. The 6950 was sold for 250. Even IF by some insane reason this card happens to be a 6950, he still got it cheaper than the guy who bought my Asus 6950 2GB VT. I will forever debate the fact that the card is not a 6950 however.

The Dual 6 pin connectors do NOT signify that it is a 6950 if it's an ES, which has been determined.

I've already talked to enough mods here to realize ES cards cant be sold here, so save me the time of not having to read 20 comments about it.

This card was purchased from Ebay 6 months prior to selling it. I got it as it is shown in his pictures, with the marker over it, and can even bring up the Ebay listing where I bought it if it's still up.

During the time I had this 6970, it was used in a Quad Fire configuration sandwiched between 3 other 6970s. The fact that it remained stable during 6 hour gaming sessions of Battlefield 2, and the Battlefield 3 Beta, etc tells me that it is in fact completely stable. It never went over 82C even when OC'd to hell and back during extensive gaming IN Quadfire.

I've had more 6970s/6950s than most people on this forum, and I am WELL aware of the driver issues/crashing associated with this generation of cards. If you don't have the perfect set of drivers for a particular game, it WILL crash. There are numerous incompatibilities with AMD drivers and various intel mobos, Windows 7, Realtek integrated audio, and several other things that cause instability with certain games.

For example, Battlfield Bad company 2 will give the White Screen of Death (WSOD) with certain motherboards with integrated Realtek Audio and 6970s. Civ 5 also has a ton of issues associated with it and 6970s. I can name games all day long that have issues with 6970s. Nvidia has its own set of issues with certain games. It's the nature of being a PC gamer, to debug.

I'm cooperating fully with alachua because had I known it would cause such a stir, I would've kept the card.
In fact, I'm trading my 2 GTX 560 TI Hawks AND my Crucial M4 128GB SSD for a pair of 6970s this coming week. I love 6970s, and the extra Vram they entail.

ALSO, regarding the vCore on the 6970 that is shown in GPU-z. GPU-Z detected the vcore as 1.5v ever since I purchased the card. Even after I checked the BIOS and confirmed that it was in fact 1.175. His temps may be high because I did increase the vcore to 1.35 at one point, and I'm not certain if I reflashed it back. 1.35v is safe, and is in fact enabled on some triple-overvoltage cards via afterburner. For some reason GPU-Z misdetects the vcore as 1.5v due to the unique Vregs used on the card. If the card WAS actually running at 1.5v, it wouldn't be stable in Windows Aero, much less gaming. The highest that vcore is possibly at right now is 1.35v, and MSI afterburner detected it for me once I changed it. For whatever reason GPU-Z is quirky with it. I was successfully able to change the voltage via afterburner on certain beta versions, which is what I suggested that he did if he didn't want to BIOS flash it. Just simply set afterburner to start at bootup with the lowered Vcore.



Best Regards