Sapphire HD 6950 Toxic Edition 2GB Review

While Sapphire aren't focusing on this aspect, the card ships with an ‘alternative' bios, which may, or may not unlock extra shaders.

The image above shows the bios switch. Simply turn off the computer, and change the position. Sapphire have already pre-programmed the bios for ‘unlocked shaders', although there is a possibility it may not work on some cards from the production line. We can consider this an ‘extra', rather than a selling point as this feature may not work on all cards.

As a reminder, the image above shows how the card looks at the ‘out of the box' bios setting. There are 1408 unified shaders at the ‘default' bios setting.

After moving the bios switch and rebooting the system, we were greeted with a full fat 1536 Unifed shaders as highlighted in the image above.

Re-running 3DMark 11 shows a minor score increase over the reference settings. This will obviously extend further when manually overclocking.

Become a Patron!