At CeBIT we remarked on the the singular case of the double BIOS on the AMD Radeon HD 6990. To recap, AMD has implemented a switch to change the GPU clock from 830 to 880 MHz (375 and 450 W modes). AMD has covered the switch on the cards on sale with a sticker referring to the following AMD site: http://www.amd.com/6990support. The page confirms that the factory setting is that of BIOS 1 and that the use of the card beyond the spec invalidates the AMD guarantee. This should of course have been clearly explained on the sticker itself as using BIOS 2 therefore invalidates AMD’s guarantee.
AMD’s partners are in the firing line here as it’s they who sell the cards to consumers and have to deal with any returns. Two of them have just announced that they will be taking returns of cards under guarantee on which BIOS 2 has been used. They are XFX who confirmed this on
Bit-tech and PowerColor on
Donanim Haber. We have contacted Sapphire but we still don’t know what their returns policy will be. Sapphire were the main AMD partner for this launch, have the biggest allocation of cards and are therefore have more to lose than other partners.
