6950: OC and unlocking shaders

[Blue]

I read several threads dealing with OC and how to unlock the shaders of the 6950 cards, however, being a newbie I couldn´t leave a comment on the existing threads; so I am posting it here.

I would like to see what experience others had trying to unlock recently purchased 6950s 1GB or 2 GB.
here is my experience:

 2 x Club 3D Radeon 6950, 2 GB, bought beg / June
they are not ref design type but have double fans, no AMD label printed on the edge connector
but they have bios switches !

1) after flashing techpowerup´s  6970 bios the system did not restart, so I went back to original bios
2) using RBE I modded the original bios to do '6970 shader' , flashed it ok - but GPU still reports only 1408 shaders
3) also flashed a modded Club 3D 6950 Bios ( from Dec 10) which I found on techpowerup, flashing was ok, - still only 1408 shaders
( for Winflash to flash ok the device id & sub module id have to be the same as in the original bios !!)

may-be recently AMD started delivering only the laser fused Cayman chips to the gfx card manufacturers, then unlocking by software is impossible ?

does anyone have some insight or tip regarding the current 6950s ?

also pls post your experience w/ unsuccesful unlocking , pls specify manufacturer, type, date of purchase and which methods tried...

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[Bloodys]

Most reference design cards can be unlocked, for example ASUS EAH6950/2DI2S/2GD5 are unlocking successfully up to 90%.

There are some cards that even though can be unlocked are not working 100% stable after that, but even if they give artifacts they may still be quite ok just for calculating hashes.