Look, the board design is the same, its the layout, routing and testing that makes it expensive. Being reference means it was made from the same gerbers, most manufacturers have the PCBs made, and then populate them with whatever components they can get cheaply that makes the spec. So the color of the board means pretty much nothing. And most manufacturers will use different components. The cooler can also be anything. Just as long as the memory can run at 6970 clocks, and the GPU is the same with some disabled blocks, you should be able to flash it to 6970.
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Question of the Day: How do you normally pay for purchases in stores?
cheap gfx cards o.0
- Thread starter Gtx Gaming
- Start date
AMD has two methods of locking the shader count on all of their recent GPUs. The first one relies on fuses inside the GPU, or on the substrate - a mechanism similar to Intel's multiplier locking. It is not reversible as far as we know. The second mechanism is the one we are interested in, AMD can configure the VGA BIOS in a way that it disables extra shaders, in addition to the ones disabled via the on-die fuses. This method is mostly used to create engineering samples or reviewer cards that match the target specifications. Usually production cards come with the shader count configured in the fuses, so that it can not be changed.
Apparently currently shipping Radeon HD 6950 cards from all manufacturers - which actually are all the same card with different sticker - have their shaders locked via the BIOS method, so we can exploit it easily
http://www.techpowerup.com/articles/overclocking/vidcard/159
Apparently currently shipping Radeon HD 6950 cards from all manufacturers - which actually are all the same card with different sticker - have their shaders locked via the BIOS method, so we can exploit it easily
http://www.techpowerup.com/articles/overclocking/vidcard/159
