6950 Worth it for Mining?

[PcChip]

the 8800GT is good for about 20 mh/s.

With puddinpop's rpcminer-cuda.exe I was getting 24, and with phoenix miner I was getting 30-31

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[acfrazier]

I thought the shaders can be unlocked on non-reference 6950's, and it can be overclocked just OK - as with other cards.

Are you saying this is not the case? 

The only ones that are guaranteed not to unlock are the Sapphire non-ref with the 1 large fan in the center.  The other non-ref are hit and miss.  I have personally unlocked the shaders on this card http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814150523

Anybody who claims it doesn't work on anything except reference design cards is misinformed.

How'd you manage to do that? Even after atiflash -unlockrom <deviceid> I still get "Cannot erase ROM" and it won't flash. Am I doing it wrong? Using just a modified version of what is on the card already. Perhaps it's my modification that's borked.

[fcmatt]

the 8800GT is good for about 20 mh/s.

With puddinpop's rpcminer-cuda.exe I was getting 24, and with phoenix miner I was getting 30-31

you are correct. i misspoke and currently guiminer shows 27 mh/s. the number i was recalling was
my attempt at using cuda which i thought would perform better and that was just not the case.

i really have to wonder if i should bother even using the 8800GT at home anymore except for brief
testing periods. Probably a waste of electricity.

[tito13kfm]

It looks like XFX got wise and started write protecting the chips.  I won't bore you with the technical details, but at this point, unless you get lucky and are shipped an old card, the only way to unlock the shaders would be tophat flashing or physically bypassing a pin on the bios chip so that it doesn't send the info to denote being write protected.

The data sheet is at http://www.datasheetcatalog.org/datasheet/SGSThomsonMicroelectronics/mXuvyxs.pdf

It shows which pin controls this info.  The only question I would have is, would it revert to unset if that leg is cut/bypassed?  I'm assuming it would return null when queried... probably would fail spectacularly.

[PcChip]

i really have to wonder if i should bother even using the 8800GT at home anymore except for brief
testing periods. Probably a waste of electricity.

I went through the same thing, turned it off when difficulty jumped up around may 25th or so, turned it right the fuck back on when price skyrocketed up so high that I didn't give a shit about electric cost.

Just bought a $150 HD5850 to replace it tonight though, so I don't have any more PCI-E slots in which to place the 8800gt, so it now sits on my desk; its once hot heatsink slowly cooling down, probably never to warm up again.