TechPowerUp has a great little Christmas gift to all the ATI fans in the community: Through a simply BIOS hack, you can turn your 6950 into a 6970, enabling some of those disabled cores.
Unlocking the additional shaders is done by flashing the card with a HD 6970 BIOS. You can find a few in our VGA BIOS collection. Any of these BIOSes will work on any reference design HD 6950 card. You could use the ASUS BIOS which comes with higher clocks & Overdrive limits and enables voltage changes via SmartDoctor, or stick with one of the reference BIOSes in case you are afraid the clocks might be too high.
They have a pretty comprehensive review of the results, showing a substantial power boost at the cost of overdriving the power a bit. As an added bonus, if you ever want to go back (or accidentally hose the BIOS flash), AMD has a great new feature onboard to let you revert to the previous version!
