so after all i did manage to use this physical mod to flash my sapphire 1gb.
i used winflash and i said flash was ok!
unfortunately i still only see 1408 shaders instead of 1536
That's because the worst binned 6970's become 6950's.
I.e. the last shader units are of very poor quality and are physically burned off from the GPU die with a laser.
Some 6950 GPUs are fully functional 6970's, artificially binned as 6950's to meet market demand.
Whether you get one of these units is just a pure luck of the draw. Just about all of the 2GB versions can be unlocked & AMD even included a BIOS switch for that purpose
GPUs in the 1GB versions are mostly the poorest yields at TSMC that are not fit to be full 1536 shader GPUs but not weak enough to be fully discarded/downgraded into 6870 GPUs with even more shaders cut off
if you do a hard mod by soldering & get lucky with a relatively good chip it might work, but with a much lower success rate than the 2GB ones
For you to see the full 1536 shaders, they need to be there physically, if not you will only see 1408 even after a successful flash
