Old School-Flashing a Radeon 6950 to a 6970

[Artista]

I bought a SAPPHIRE HD 6950 2GB OC GDDR5. Thinking about flashing it using TechPowerUp RBE.

http://www.techpowerup.com/rbe/

It saves the ROM from the card to a file, loads the ROM, you mod it the way you want, save it, then use winflash to flash the GPU bios.

I am thinking of doing this and ONLY unlocking the shaders.

Is this a huge risk? What type of performance increase would I get? (worth risk?)

Thanks

http://www.sapphiretech.com/presentation/product/?cid=1&gid=3&sgid=1041&lid=1&pid=1530&leg=0

(Sapphire specifically says on their website that they made this card with dual bios so people can customize it) Quote below.

"A Dual BIOS feature allows enthusiasts to experiment with alternative BIOS settings and performance can be further enhanced with the SAPPHIRE overclocking tool, TriXX."

 

[Haserath]

There is a risk if you use the wrong BIOS, but as long as it's right and you have a dual bios switch, even with a bad flash you'd be able to recover.

Most 6950's unlocked. The performance will be about 5% better, so it is a bit but not a world of difference. It unlocks about 9% more shader/texture units.

Mine has a normal 6970 flash and it works perfectly. I think AMD had such good yields that the 6950 was merely cut down to differentiate the products.