Did you or are you going to build your computer?

[kimosabi]

Originally Posted by T}{OR

Nice as it sounds - this will kill the card quickly. I wouldn't recommend it. 6970 already runs hot as it is. Besides that, there are power limitations for running 6970 BIOS on a 6950 card.

The deal is that the cards have differently binned memory chips. It is a bit of hit and miss but in most cases you won't "kill the card quickly". Many does get artifacts though and I wouldn't recommend it to anyone who's not overclocking on a regular basis as it includes using MSI Afterburner/Asus Smartdoctor, BIOS flashing and modding scripts to get a good shader activation.

Or, if you're unlucky, you get a card which is among the least scoring cards at the factory test. Most chips are good enough for a 6970 but any chips with least amount of imperfection will be used in a 6970, not 6950, so a 6950 is pretty much chips who didn't make the cut to be mounted on a 6970. The shaders are locked for a reason.