AMD Radeon HD 5850 and HD 6950 revived – cleaning, assembly and the hunt for old records | Time travel

1 - Motivation and joy for something old 2 - Refurbish: the nasty part (General) 3 - Time travel back: DirectX11, drivers and tools 4 - Logging, benchmarks and test system 5 - ATI Radeon HD 5850 - the dirt catcher 6 - Powercolor HD 6950 - it doesn't want to become a 6970! Conclusion

From the outside, I also immediately saw that the 6950 needed cleaning. Only here the dirt had spread better and was not quite so concentrated around the cooling block. Here I could see that the thermal paste was a totally dry crust – it didn’t conduct much anymore. I don’t want to reproach the nice sellers, but that’s how you sometimes look after more than ten years in old hardware.  In general, however, these old cards are relatively easy to open and maintain. Four screws detach the cooler from the board, and four more screws hold the heatsink and fan shroud together. The most difficult part is usually the plug for the fans – this should not tear out the socket.  

The 6950 (2 GB) is famous for its great ability to unlock it via bios flash (or switch) into a 6970 with more shaders, which was also my secret hope. Unfortunately I found out that my card does not want this, neither with Bios 1, nor with 2. Voices in the depths of the net say this goes mainly with the 2 GB (VRAM) versions, while coincidence has brought me a 1 GB. That’s just a pity.

Load case: stock performance

The second card in the test achieves 3,652 points in Fire Strike with default settings, so it is considerably stronger than the previously reported 5850.

Load case: driver maxxed out

With the maximum settings in the driver, there is a significant boost of an additional 13% in performance, which is 4,130 in Fire Strike points.

Load case: the sky is the limit!

The VRAM seems to be healthy on this card, but it doesn’t like more than 1.3 volts of voltage. The GPU does not scale up quite as far either; it stopped at 1,015 MHz. Nevertheless, I achieve a maximum of 4,350 points in Fire Strike here in the test, which is a good 19% more compared to Stock. Great increase, but relatively a bit less than the 5850. 

Again, I show below in the chart what has #5 spot in the global Fire Strike leaderboard in points – phew, unattainable. However, I was able to reach #15 on the leaderboard with my best performance here – so the top is a collection of runaways to the top!

Conclusion

First of all, tinkering and tuning with the old cards is a lot of fun – I can’t break much and when it really happens – not much is broken 😉 Especially thanks to the still existing driver support, it’s actually relatively easy to get the cards working again. Only the own motherboard could of course make problems due to too many components, like in my case. And secondly, all the cards tested so far still show me very vital signs of life. I am always surprised myself what performance can still be squeezed out of it. Of course, the cool temperatures on my balcony help, but my impression is that for the older generations, the chip goodness may actually be distributed a little better than it is today. 

If you’ve got the urge now, I think you know how to reach me if you need tips, or if someone wants to start a little contest for a specific chip.