Currently we are testing a handful of R6800 cards from AMD's board partners and we ran into a curiosity yesterday. One of the 6850 cards we tested was showing above baseline performance which made... More...
Interesting news, but I think it would be good to see if all the 6850 are flashable? Still, 6850 reail for around £150 here, the cheapest 6870 in the country is £176... I think £26 is worth it over taking the risk of flashing the card... but yeah, if this is confirmed to work on all the cards, then nice
nice one then... one more thing though... 6850 only have 1x 6-pin PCI Express power connector. 6870 have 2x 6-pin PCI Express power connector. Flashing the 6850 would practically mean running a 6870 using only 1x 6-pin PCI Express power connector. Would that even work?
This might be another GTX465 scenario. Some cards will work after flashed, some cards wont. Cooling on 6870 and 6850 looks the same, but PCB is different, perhaps some factory overcloked model with a bit better cooling, now if that could be under 200€... I'll see what happens I'll look for some more info.
Well officially its 75 watt through pci-e slot on the motherboard an further 75 watt for every 6 pin pci express power connector giving 150 watts where as 6870 has 225 watts play with. I would imagine if the card required 160 watts, it would still manage to pull few extra watts through both connectors even though they officially support upto 150 watts doesn't mean it can't pull little bit extra from them.
75W is the not the max, it's the recommended value .. And if'm right the minimum needed ... you can increase it without problem .. a 5870 have 2x 6pin + the slot this made, 225W ... i m sure i run them a lot higher when i OC to 1100mhz my 5870....
Yeah that's what i was on about even though its the spec 75 watt doesn't mean you can't bend that spec for extra wattage :banana:
i'd love to see if retails can unlock but i dont think so ... 5850 could use an 5870 bios but no unlocking. heres some info on the test samples that were given to review sites. http://******************com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=12388&Itemid=47 oh guess not but here is what amd had to say about it. Official AMD Response: Apparently a small number of the AMD Radeon HD 6850 press samples shipped from AIB partners have a higher-than-expected number of stream processors enabled. This is because some AIBs used early engineering ASICs intended for board validation on their press samples. The use of these ASICs results in the incorrect number of stream processors. If you have an HD 6850 board sample from an AIB, please test using a utility such as GPU-z to determine the number of active stream processors. If that number is greater than 960, please contact us and we will work to have your board replaced with a production-level sample. All boards available in the market, as well as AMD-supplied media samples, have production-level GPUs with the correct 960 stream processors.
Sorry about the slight off-topic, but if the flash goes awry and you brick your video card, is it possible to stick another, temporary video card into your other PCI-E slot and flash the old BIOS back, thus restoring the bricked card to its former, working state?
Thanks! In that case, I guess even a bad flash isn't nearly as tragic as it might seem, provided, of course, that you have taken the necessary precautions (a bootable USB stick with atiflash and a spare card prepared for the flashing session)
winflash would crash when my video card bios was ****ed up. Maybe just for my case, but for recovery, atiflash msdos is the way to go (had no usb nor CD, so did it with my photo camera flash memory xP) Changing BIOS and such can KILL the card completely, happened to my 9600gt whejn i was trying to fix a fabrication bug, altho it was an error and the other BIOs was from a totally different architecture. RMAed tho
I don't remember where I read it but the shaders supposedly cannot be unlocked at the BIOS level. Edit: I found where I read it. That's not to say you can't flash with the 6870 BIOS..... "For those of you excited about the possibility of 'unlocking' your HD 6850, it's not going to happen; the disabling is done at an ASIC level, not BIOS." http://www.rage3d.com/reviews/video/amd_hd6800_launch_review_addendum/
did anybody see the Update in the Gyru Article" ** update -- as it is right now looks like a BIOS update is not possible and that the extra shaders are dealt with at ASIC level.
