Flashed and Ruined my 6950?

[Elky72]

Hello, First of all I'm a noob when it comes to overclocking. I know somewhat how it's done but have no experience what so ever. So please be kind. Also prepare for wall of Text

First I had a Asus 6970 2Gb version reference card. It was quite ok ran a mild overclock on it 915/1420/1.2V. Not a very cool running card and noisy but ok. All was well until I managed to brick it when I took it out so i could dust out my case properly.

Reason was probably static electricity. I'm usually very very carefull when it comes to somthing like that. I have reasonable experience working on hardware. It's the 2nd time I've had this happen and it was probably 10 years ago when I had this only other incident.

Ok so 6970 card ruined. Saturday morning I went to buy another one. Sadly they had no 6970 in stock, but they do had the Asus 6950 Direct CU II. I've remembered from somewhere you could flash a 6950 to 6970, so took this card home. Installed it ran it stock for about 30 mins and set out to flash it. Grabbed the 6970 CU II bios from the net and flashed it to the card using a bootable flashdrive and atiflash. Rebooted, reinstalled drivers and my system recognized it as 6970 CU II. Changed the power consumption settings in AMD overdrive to +20% as it was recomended by tutorial.

Tested the card it ran well, cool and quiet. It ran the 6970 stock settings 890/1375/1.17 as opposed to the 6950 stock 810/1250/1.1 . Ran benchmarks on it (Unigine and 3dmark 11).

Gamed a bit on it GTA4 with texture mods and Skyrim also with texture mods (Both 5760x1080). All was well no artefacting or freezing. So very happy with it.

Now the Direct CU II cards have a better cooler on them as the reference cards. The card ran like 54°C on full load. My previous bricked card ran like low 80's. So some more headroom for an overclock. After a whole afternoon fiddling and testing it I got it to 950/1500/1.27 . Benchmarked and game tested, it still ran below 70°C no artefacting or freezing. Truly happy and amazed it outperformed my previous card. Ended up playing GTA4 for 2 hours and went on to play Skyrim. Played about 4-5 hours I gues until it crashed, 2 screens went black the 3rd brown tints vertical stripes. Not so happy about that.

Rebooted my system and it just wouldn't run the benchamrk tests or any game without the same result after a couple of mins. So flashed it to a 6950 unlocked shader bios, with stock settings. But not all is well, have artefacting in unigine. 3d mark strangely enough not but when finished it directs me to the results webpage. Where it says card runs at 500 core clock. GPU-z show the stock clocks and registers the stock 810 clock in the sensors tab on full load. So ????

I can game, haven't tried GTA4 yet. Skyrim runs well for 2 hours more or less and then just crashes with black and brown screens.

Anyone have an idea that could fix this or did I just ruin 2 cards in just as many days

Sorry for the wall of text but I do want to explain my problem properly

 

[leejc73]

Flick the bios switch. Don't believe there isn't one or that it applies some non turbo mode. I can see mine drop from 1536 shaders to 1408 so it does something.

Once you've got it there copy that bios and flick the switch back and flash with the bios you just created. The 6950's don't like overclocks too much with unlocked shaders as I've found, or when you crossfire them.

 

[Elky72]

I still have the original 1408 shader bios backed up. It's the one I edited to get a 6950 1536 shader Bios. Will flash the stock one back and try it out.

I see in your signature that you run 2 Asus 6950's But are they referance cards? If so I know they do have a dual bios switch same as my 6970 brick

The Direct CU II's do have a switch but it's not related to bios

Asus 6950 Direct CU II Product Page

As you can see in the overview there's a way too small picture. It explains that it switches between dual or single link on these cards.

Anyhow thanks for replying will try it out and post result.

 

[leejc73]

Yeah that's the marketing bollocks. I've got dual cu2's mate. Switching output capabilities has to be a bios change so although they state it's for dual link display port output it's effectively a secondary bios.

Switch it and check your shader count, I promise you that's a secondary bios of some sort I can't think of any other way of changing the port allocation besides a firmware switch, don't even think you could do it mechanically.

 

[Elky72]

You're probably right on the switch. I just knew when I looked up the specs it's what it mentioned on the site, but your argument makes a lot of sense. Sorry didn't bother to unhook my rig and open it to change it and be sure. My case is temporarily quite uncoveniently placed and it's quite the hassle to do anything on it within. I will confirm, in the upcoming weekend. When I'mm gonna take apart my whole setup to modify my desk and resolve the unconvenient placement. But that's not why I posted here.

I went for the easy way and just flashed the Bios again with the stock 6950 1408 shader version by flashdrive booting my system. I've tested the new bios setting with Unigine and 3dmark11. Very strange the score on unigine was 40 points better as the 1536 shader 6950 bios test, but still had artefacting.

To be sure what actually happens. On some of the stages in unigine the grass seems to clip with the landscape. Not by much it's like flickering but when I watch more closely it's like it is a bit raised or under the landscape. This is also considered to be artefacting. Right? In previous runs before the crash with 6970 bios, I've never encountered these.

Moving on. 3dmark11 ran it, no issues I could see. Until I came to the end to results displayed in browser. Again showed a lower clock. This time 450 core clock?? GPU-z shows just as previous 810 core clock like it should be. Maybe run 3dmark11 again tomorow and see if I can get an even lower core clock.

Haven't moved on to game testing it with Skyrim or GTA4. Did play EVE online for 2hours but it's not something that pushes the card. Gonna do some game testing tommorow. Will update thereafter

 

[leejc73]

Just a thought. Something you haven't mentioned already. Which version of the catalyst drivers are you running? I had a nightmare getting a stable system purely because of the drivers. This might be down to a crossfire headache but the most stable I've found to date are the 11.11 for games and 11.8 for benching. I think it was 11.8 anyway it's hard to recall.

 

[Azurite]

You could change the 6950 to 6970 on the early versions. Iv heard that amd have sorted this a while back. Since you managed to do it, i have my doubhts that amd actually did anything with this issue.

You can get the 11.11a and 11.11b driver now-. It fixes many problems in the latest released games.

http://support.amd.com/us/kbarticles/Pages/catalyst-1111b-performance.aspx

 

[Elky72]

@ leejc73 I'm running the 11.11 drivers at the moment. Haven't tried benchmarking with old drivers yet. The 11.11 drivers worked well before.

@ Azurite Yes You still can flash them, but not out of windows anymore. I've found numerous tutorials on the net and they used winflash to flash the card from within the operating system. But the Direct CU II card did not allow it. I did however was able to do it with a bootable flash drive and atiflash.

Booted from the flash drive and used the command prompt to run atiflash and flash bios to card.

Now I've ran the complete stock configuration on the card 1408 shaders and all. Tried the anno 2070 demo to see how it did there and would go over to GTA4 and Skyrim testing. Anno 2070 ran for about 10 mins and again crash. Didn't bother to go trough with the other games testing. So just out of curiosity I tried Unigine again and it to crashed before it got to stage 4 of 26. It's as if the card is degrading or something like that.

Will get my hands on the new 11.11b drivers. Altough the drivers shouldn't be responsible for the crashing in Unigine. Skyrim does indeed had it's fair share problems with crashes, mainly something to do with memory allocation on x64 systems and crossfire support. Had alot of crashes to desktop with skyrim but that was fixed with a launcher that enables skyrim to use 4gb memory,I have no crossfire. This crashing is like mentioned above the screens go black or a solid coulour with vertical stripes in just a different tone. Only thing I can do is reboot the pc.

Not sure where to go from here.

 

[Azurite]

@ leejc73 I'm running the 11.11 drivers at the moment. Haven't tried benchmarking with old drivers yet. The 11.11 drivers worked well before.

@ Azurite Yes You still can flash them, but not out of windows anymore. I've found numerous tutorials on the net and they used winflash to flash the card from within the operating system. But the Direct CU II card did not allow it. I did however was able to do it with a bootable flash drive and atiflash.

Booted from the flash drive and used the command prompt to run atiflash and flash bios to card.

Now I've ran the complete stock configuration on the card 1408 shaders and all. Tried the anno 2070 demo to see how it did there and would go over to GTA4 and Skyrim testing. Anno 2070 ran for about 10 mins and again crash. Didn't bother to go trough with the other games testing. So just out of curiosity I tried Unigine again and it to crashed before it got to stage 4 of 26. It's as if the card is degrading or something like that.

Will get my hands on the new 11.11b drivers. Altough the drivers shouldn't be responsible for the crashing in Unigine. Skyrim does indeed had it's fair share problems with crashes, mainly something to do with memory allocation on x64 systems and crossfire support. Had alot of crashes to desktop with skyrim but that was fixed with a launcher that enables skyrim to use 4gb memory,I have no crossfire. This crashing is like mentioned above the screens go black or a solid coulour with vertical stripes in just a different tone. Only thing I can do is reboot the pc.

Not sure where to go from here.

Same as i used for my 5870's. I lost my HDMI function so i flashed them back to original. Im not going to flash anymore cards... Just going to break warranty in other ways

Il just get the right brand next time....

 

[leejc73]

Hi mate.

I used atiwinflash from within windows and didn't have a problem it used to stick on the first attempt sometimes but flashed always on the second. As for the drivers they are possibly the most shocking shortfall on these cards. I would get passes on 3dmark vantage then next run would crash. Unigine was the same, I've just installed 11.11b and battlefield 3 seems to be starting better although I'm out at the minute so will try again when I get home. There is a 11.21 beta kicking about which I might have a crack with as well.

 

[Elky72]

Ok Bit of a delay on the reply's and update. Woke up Yesterday with flu, spent since then most of my time in bed.

With winflash I got an error message, don't know why it just did. Did not spend much time on it went straight to bootable flashdrive

Installed the 11.11b drivers. Just tried to have a go at skyrim and it seems Bethesda broke the game again with an update. So did launch Anno 2070 demo and GTA4 again to see if crashing still occured.

And yes both crashed within 5 mins. From what I observe it looks like as long as there's no full load on the GPU nothing happens. Left the pc on for over +/- 32 hours and nothing happened till I ran a game.

Seriously considering to murder my piggybank and get another card.

 

[leejc73]

Can you do the same process you've just been through with the switch in the other position please bud? And what 11.11 drivers are you running? 11.11, 11.11a or 11.11b?

 

[Elky72]

I have currently the 11.11b drivers installed. Today I've flashed the 6950 1536 shader bios back to the card and unhooked my rig to test again with the bios switch in the other position. Before I unhooked I checked and in GPU-Z it showed 1536 shaders

First of all It does indeed controll the switching between 2 different biosses. With the switch in the other position GPU-Z showed the 1408 shader count. The card does have a dual-bios switch even if it's not advertised that way, Like you said

.So on to testing.

Tried 3dmark11, unigine, Anno 2070 demo and GTA 4. Most of them chrashed from the point there was put a load on the GPU. Except GTA4 that ran for about 2 mins.

Was quite fed up with all the messing around. So I just went to the store and bought yet another card.

Picked up the MSI R6970 Lightning, it was 10€ more expensive as the Direct CU II 6970. Wich was actually the card I wanted to buy before I bought the 6950 Direct CU II to replace the bricked one. They just didn't had it in stock then, now they did and also the MSI one. Chose this one because it already runs at a factory overclock 940/1375/1.2 .

When installed (also 11.11b drivers) I ran every test mentioned above. On the benchmarks it ran like it should and with results just a couple of points lower as the 6950 with the 6970 bios on it and OC'd. On to gametesting. GTA 4 I managed to play for an hour without any crashing, left that for Anno 2070 Demo wich I ran for 20 mins. Wanted to test it on skyrim. I've spent quite some time to undo the update Bethesda did this week and have been playing that for over 3 hours without a problem.

I do believe now that it is something hardware related. Don't know what the actual problem is with the card, but what I do know I'm not touching the MSI one. It runs great and intend to keep it that way. Because this one has to last for a long time. Did put some money aside for another keyboard, mouse and case, but that's gone now. Lesson Learned

 

[neoguyver1]

Hi mate get her in the second GPU slot and preference "atiflash -f -p 1 bios.bin", you will need a primary car to boot into the atiflash. Just get the bios you need re-flash and sell her on.
I had this happen a few times i tried flashing my 7950 with sapphire bios's and it wrecked it. Ended up using an AMD BIOS with 925 core and working like a charm. Mind you i was stressed.

(if u use onboard and is ati still use 1 i think if intel 0, just use "atiflash -i" to see the adapters.)