Noise Pollution: Replacing Fans on a Sapphire Radeon HD 6950 2GB

A few years back, I bought a Sapphire Radeon HD 6950 2GB for my main gaming PC, which I've since replaced with an MSI GTX 970 Gaming 4GB card. However, towards the end of it's service, one or both of the fans on the card started to make a lot of noise; especially when they spun at faster speeds needed to keep the thing cool while I played games! I've wanted to put the card back into service in my wife's PC, but not before I'd done something about that racket, so I found some compatible fans on Ebay and went about replacing them. Here's my check list of items I used, in case you fancy giving this a go yourself

• Draper Precision Screwdriver Set
• 75mm Dual-X Fan Replacements
• Arctic Silver 5
• Arctic Silver ArctiClean

My trusty Sapphire Radeon HD 6950

Four screws holding the heat sink in place.

Heat sink removed

Removing the plastic shroud meant unscrewing these little fellas

Bleaurgh... Dust build up in the heat sink

The plastic shroud and noisy fan(s)

Shroud with fans removed

Replacement fans

New fans fitted to the shroud

GPU covered in thermal paste - this needs to go!

All clean - this was so reflective, taking a photo was almost impossible!

"Job's a good-un", as they say...

The procedure took me just under two hours to complete and so far seems to have been a complete success; the card has returned to normal noise levels when under load. Something interesting that I noticed when I had the heat sink off is that it doesn't appear to make direct contact with the video memory chips on the board, but the clearance between the two doesn't facilitate the installation of after-market heat sinks. This is a bit disappointing as video memory can get quite hot as well as the GPU itself!

Nvidia Game24

I was very disappointed to not be able to attend the Game24 event in London last week; an unfortunate combination of poor connectivity and memory on my part! However, I was determined to take part in the 24 hour celebration of PC gaming (oh, and the launch of a couple of little products by Nvidia), so my wife and I set up a mini-LAN party in our lounge:

ALL THE SCREENS

The Two Towers: Icarus (white) and Daedalus (blue).

I watched a fair bit of the Nvidia Twitch streams; it was nice to see such a wide range of topics discussed and different interviews. However, we mostly just played a lot of Guild Wars 2!

Unsuccessful Unlock: Sapphire 6950 HD

Back when I purchased my current graphics card, a Sapphire 6950 HD, I was intrigued by the possibility of being able to access the additional shader units locked out by AMD as part of the binning process. At the time, I had read about the possibility of AMD switching from disabling the shader units via the BIOS to physically cutting the electrical connections with a laser, so I understood that I wasn't guaranteed success. Turns out that my card was laser cut after all, which is disappointing. However, I did learn about GPU BIOS modding, got acquainted with some useful tools and made a couple of interesting observations during the process that I'd like to share.

Research

Following some research, I found there were two relatively simple methods that could be followed to try and access the additional shader units:

• Flashing a 6950 card with an appropriate 6970 BIOS.
• Modifying the BIOS currently on the card to unlock the additional shaders.

Initially, I thought the first option sounded the easiest to achieve and came with the added advantage of clocking the memory higher as well. However, after some further reading, it seemed that this should only be attempted with cards based on AMD's reference 6950, causing issues on cards that were not. So, I opted for the BIOS modification approach, for which there are many useful tools and guides that helped me along my way:

• Unlocking Radeon HD 6950 Tested - HWLab (about half-way down they detail the instructions for modding the BIOS).
• GPU-Z - tool to identify GPUs in a system, report their configurations and write out a copy of the BIOS to a file.
• Mod_BIOS_HD_6950 - a small script that specifically only unlocks the additional shaders in a downloaded 6950 BIOS.
• HD 6950 to HD 6970 Flashing Tools - the ATI WinFlash tool bundled can be used to flash a modified BIOS to a 6950.
• Radeon BIOS Editor (RBE) - utility for viewing and tweaking the configuration of a BIOS.

While the HWLab article I mention does a great job of detailing the steps needed to unlock the shaders, I felt it necessary to include the basic method I intended to followed here, for completeness:

1. Change the BIOS switch to position 1.
2. Use GPU-Z to dump out the current BIOS to disk.
3. Use the Mod_BIOS_HD_6950 tool to modify the shader parameter in the BIOS image.
4. Flash the modified BIOS back to the 6950.

Problems

My first, if minor, issue was simply locating the BIOS switch on my Sapphire card. I'd performed many a Google Image search to see where I should be looking but at first glance I couldn't see it. It can be found near the CrossFire connector on most 6950 cards, but as you can see from this shot taken inside my case, it's not immediately obvious:

I had to look extremely closely to see the switch and had to use a small screwdriver to change it's position. Here's a better close up pic I managed to take:

The real issue that I ran into was that when I tried to mod the BIOS I obtained from my card, the Mod_BIOS_HD_6950 tool simply output the following message:

Given that the BIOS image was essentially a binary file, I assumed that the mod tool was simply scanning for a particular pattern (byte sequence) within the data and changing some values if found (a binary search and replace). The fact that my BIOS didn't have this byte sequence intrigued me, so I grabbed the RBE tool and loaded the (unmodified) BIOS file up to check it out. I was surprised to see the following:

It appears that the Sapphire card shipped with a pre-modded BIOS that could be accessed simply by changing the BIOS switch position, it's just a shame my card had a physically disabled GPU that couldn't take advantage of it! Just to confirm this, I shut down my PC, flipped the BIOS switch back and took a look at the BIOS I'd been running with previously. Sure enough, that BIOS image was completely unmodified:

Conclusion

So, while not the ideal outcome, I can't be too disappointed; I was essentially trying to get something for nothing, or at least minimal time investment. I can't say I've ever been let down by the card in it's stock configuration, this was more of an experiment to see what was possible. I've learnt new things in the process, which is always amazing and I hope some of this post proves interesting if not useful to others.

This whole experience did get me thinking though: what would be my next steps to adding some graphical performance to the system? So far, I've come up with three possibilities:

• Simply overclocking the card using the Sapphire TriXX utility - this would be pretty easy to do, is free, but likely to produce the smallest improvement.
• Buying another Sapphire 6950 HD and configuring the two cards in CrossFire - seems this card is difficult and expensive to buy new these days, which is to be expected, but can be found for around GBP 100.00 on Ebay. However, CrossFire has been known to complicate matters: game profiles and frame pacing on the software side, with the additional power requirements and heat dissipation to think about at the hardware level.
• Upgrading the GPU to something more modern - the 6000-series GPUs are getting on a bit now, especially after Nvidia's recent release of it's 700-series line up. However, I would probably be looking at around GBP 200.00 if I opted to upgrade. I suspect this is a little out of my price range for now and perhaps I'll wait and see what AMD's rumoured 9000-series cards are like.

I'll most likely go ahead with the overclocking option for now, as my card seems to hit around 55°C when gaming, so there's potentially some headroom there. I'll be sure to post my experiences once I've got something to report!

Post Upgrade Woes - Part 1: Display Corruption

As mentioned in my previous post, following my GPU upgrade, I experienced some odd behaviour. Strangely enough, the computer worked perfectly directly after the upgrade; I was even able to jump into a game of Skyrim (and be wowed with the massive increase in performance, I might add). However, when I logged into another account, strange artifacts appeared on screen, the screen flickered off and back on and, finally, the whole rig spontaneously rebooted!

Extremely worried there was an issue with the card, I logged back into my account; no artifacts appeared and I was able to run FurMark for an extended period without any problems. However, logging out and back into the secondary account immediately resulted in the same problem. After the machine rebooted again, I tried logging in as the "Admin" account I have configured; same problem. This time I was able to see a message briefly pop up on screen, which I later tracked down in the Event Viewer:

"Display driver stopped responding and has recovered"

Researching online brought up a host of reasons why this message might appear, but considering the issue only occurred in certain user accounts, I was fairly certain that some remnants of the previous card's drivers were causing the issue, and that running the driver installation in my user account had not cleared up other accounts on the system. To test my theory, I booted into safe mode, logged into the "Admin" account and used the msconfig tool to stop the AMD/ATI Catalyst Control Centre from starting when logging in. Sure enough, I was able to reboot and log into the "Admin" account with no problems at all.

After a bit more reading around I discovered a tool named "Driver Sweeper" that some people claimed to have helped them with similar problems. I'm very sceptical about installing any sort of 3rd party utilities on my machine; usually they don't uninstall properly, don't work, or you get more than you bargained for (i.e. ad/mal/spy-ware)! However, given the number of times the tool was referenced on forums, I decided to give it a go.

Once Driver Sweeper was installed, I executed a scan for video drivers and it located several files that I hadn't been aware of and even the installation files that are extracted to C:\ATI! After clearing away all the driver remnants, I rebooted and performed a fresh install of the AMD catalyst drivers in the "Admin" account, before rebooting and testing that I could log into each of the three accounts on the system without issue. This test proved successful, with no re-occurrence of the artifacts or rebooting, and I was safe to use the system normally again!

Hardware Refresh: GPU Upgrade

It's been a couple of years since I built my primary desktop machine/gaming rig. I had built the machine on a fairly tight budget back then, opting to re-use some components from my previous desktop. Since then, the machine's only upgrade has been a necessary storage boost in the form of a 1TB HDD.

The majority of the games played on the system didn't really tax the 5770 driving the graphics, however, certain titles it was not possible to play at 1920x1080 without sacrificing texture detail. Combine that with the release of more taxing games, like Battlefield 3, I finally decided a GPU upgrade was in order.

Decisions, Decisions...

Choosing a GPU can be a tricky business; the numeric naming schemes in use by both AMD and Nvidia do not provide much clue as to what features/specs the card offers and bigger numbers don't always mean better performance, especially when talking about a card's on-board memory, it would seem.

I had around GBP 200.00 to spend on the upgrade, which is a reasonable amount to play with and I wanted to make sure I got the best could get at that price point. I did a fair bit of research, reading various sites' GPU reviews and round-ups, including a very useful "Best PCIe Card for your Money" article on Toms Hardware.

In the end, the two cards I whittled my choices down to were an Asus 560Ti with 1GB of on-board memory, or a Sapphire HD 6950 with 2GB. After much agonising, I opted for the Sapphire for the following reasons:

• The 6950 GPU has the potential for an after-market performance boost via a BIOS tweak; unlocking the additional shader units disabled by AMD when creating 6950 GPUs from the 6970 chip. It's also possible to then overclock the GPU to the same voltage a stock 6970 operates at, producing a card that performs almost identically to a reference 6970! Obviously, this process isn't guaranteed to work, and can result in rendering a card pretty much useless, which is why the Sapphire card ships with a dual-BIOS system. A small switch flips between the two BIOS images stored on the card; allowing safer experimentation with the card.
• I had read that Battlefield 3's high res textures can really take advantage of cards with more than 1GB of RAM; all those textures have to be loaded somewhere for them to be used!
• AMD's stereoscopic 3D implementation, HD3D, is functionally different to Nvidia's 3D Vision; essentially, it is geared towards using an existing 3D display and glasses. I own a 3D TV and, even though I don't use the 3D feature much (a lack of content more than anything else), I decided that HD3D would be better suited to me, in case I ever decided to give it a whirl. This was despite 3D Vision being a more mature product.
• My M4A77TD-Pro motherboard only supports AMD Crossfire and not Nvidia's SLi. If I ever wanted to run a dual-GPU configuration, I need AMD graphics cards.

The Plan

While waiting for the upgrade to arrive, I decided on some further changes I would make to the rig while installing the new GPU:

• Remove the Enermax PSU in the system and install a Corsair VX550W that I had been lucky enough to win in a competition.
  
  
  
• Remove two older hard drives from the system. One was the 160GB HDD I had Windows installed on before the HDD upgrade I mentioned previously, the other a 300GB device that was the home of the Fedora install. I finally decided that the desktop was booted into Linux so little, it would make sense to move the functionality offered by the OS to another, dedicated machine.

The Process

After disconnecting the mass of cables from the rear of the system, I took the side panel off in order to get at the components I needed to remove:

As you can see, it wasn't the prettiest of systems, so I made a note to try and run the cables in a tidier fashion with the new PSU. Getting at both the GPU and PSU out was easy and before long I had the new PSU installed:

At this point, I realised that between the Enermax and Corsair PSUs, I had enough extra black screws that I decided to make a minor aesthetic change; replacing the silver screws at the back of the case. I always wondered why a black case was shipped with plain metal screws; I guess because they were at the rear, it saved a small amount of money not having them coloured. After swapping them over, I realised I would need to invest in some black thumb-screws if I wanted to complete the look:

After the quick wins of the previous two modifications, I found removing the HDDs far trickier. The Thermaltake case has a removable 3.5" HDD cage that is mounted at the front of the chassis; you can see where by finding the HDDs in the above picture. The problem was that to un-mount the HDDs themselves, I had to remove the cage, which was made impossible by the front-panel I/O connectors at the bottom of the motherboard:

Ensuring these connectors are appropriately wired up is one of the most fiddly bits of a PC build in my opinion, and I loathed the thought of removing them to get the cage out. No matter how I tried, I couldn't safely slide the cage out and so had to unplug all the front-panel I/O to proceed!

After I finally had the old drives out of the chassis and the new GPU in, I proceeded to connect the various power leads to their respective components. Not only was I careful to bundle up extra cables, but I ran the HDD and fan power around the back of the chassis, which resulted in a much tidier interior than before:

The Result

Overall, I am very pleased with the way the upgrade went; it only took a couple of hours and the system is much cleaner to boot! The system produces far smoother game-play and/or better detail; which was lucky because Bethesda had just released free Skyrim hi-res texture-pack DLC!

Despite the ease of the physical upgrade, I have experienced some odd issues with the system in the months following. Nothing too disruptive, but enough to warrant a separate post or two. Stay tuned... Hopefully I'll get around to posting them soon!

Poppin' Them Thangs...

In order to recondition an old Dell workstation for use as an OpenNMS server, parts were harvested from several other machines that were lying around. During the process of testing the various memory modules on offer, the machine had to be powered off and on repeatedly and, after a while, it simply ceased to display any output on the attached monitor.

Attempts to reseat the graphics card didn't have any affect and upon closer inspection, it was clear the graphics card was dead:



As you can see from the image of the card in question, the capacitors have clearly "popped"; their tops are bulging outwards. Also, you can see that the electrolyte has vented through the top of the capacitor in the centre of the image.

Luckily, there were plenty of other machines lying around to harvest parts from!