Bitcoin Forum

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Did you unlock by reflashing with a 6970 bios?

The 6970 cards use higher-grade memory chips than 6950, thus a bios flash would set higher memory voltages and clocks than the 6950 memory can handle.
This approach is widely known to be potentially lethal to the card, that's why alternative means of unlocking were devised (e.g. the RBE method).
Once the damage is done, nothing short of replacing the failed memory chips can help.

Mining uses next to no memory at all, therefore as long as the physically first memory chip on the card is operational the card will work fine.

Also, remember never to use high overclock settings used for mining for playing games - games use other areas of the chip than only the stream processors which may not like the insanely high clocks.

Just run GPUz and check the clocks and voltages.
Post a screenshot here if you're unsure what to look for.

The bounty be damned, I find it more interesting whether the malfunction was caused by the bios flash or mining.

I never damaged any of my cards but there have been failures aplenty reported in the forums.
One user reported 10 out of 10 failed GPUs after 6 months of mining - surely, he must have done something wrong.

Your cards seem to have had an easy life being undervolted and only slightly overclocked.

Since you mention this was a specially crafted BIOS, the failure is either mining-related or just random.

Have you tried it in a different Motherboard? also you could try cooking the card in the oven for a few minutes

Its not the motherboard. I know that for sure. The oven method I have not tried. I am not experienced with that. I've read about people doing it for different things. It creates a "re-flow" of something so that the electrical condition is better. I'll google it but please tell me more about this and what it might fix

Edit: I did google it. I am considering this. Bake it at 385 for 8  minutes maybe longer. I didn't see a consensus online but 8-10 minutes seemed to be it. I might just try this.
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Remember this is only temporary.

Remember this is only temporary.
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Reflow means melting the joints that join whatever is on the PCB to the PCB itself. In many heat/cool routines, the joints can become stressed and crack. Liquifying, or reflowing, them removes these cracks and completes the circuit.

Yes, but it is only a matter of time before the problem returns and you have to do it again, next time it won't that long.
It can work for a few weeks or a few months.

I don't know, I would rather RMA it before trying to "bake" it.  MSI warranties through the serial number.

Now that the card is really "baked", does it still mine ? or is it completely dried toast now

 But it shows desktop, can you play videos with it, etc? Tried to run 3dmark03? Tried to run older games, which not require shader support, Unreal Tournament, Mafia for example or some 2d games like Fallout, Baldurs Gate?

Well yeah, then gpu chip is dying/almost dead. Desktop requires almost zero load from card. But shader units are still ok it seems - you still can mine with it with same performance. So, most probably its not mining killed the card. Well, its a lesson - never try to unlock shaders, never run it with custom "homebrewed" bios and mine with underclocked mem/max possible undervolting.

unlocking shaders in a 6950 is ok, only running a 6970 bios isn't

Do you know what was changed exactly in that bios?
Also what were the VRM temperatures?

Does this card actually crash the driver when trying to run games, or does it just always have visual artifacts?

Not quite.  That's why I asked.  You said something about raising voltage causing artifacts when you first got the card.  I was double checking to see if it was stable other than the artifacts.  I think it was just assumed by others.

I have had baked cards run for years, it is a combination of random and the number of hot cold cycles, best bet IMO is to run your stuff 24-7-365

Well I doubt it would last that long with GF8800 cards ;-)
Also with those that are lead-free.

lol...fail

2x 6950 unlocked here have run 900MHz-400Mh/s for over a year 24/7 so yeah...whatever