The 6000 series has dual BIOS's; one locked so you can always revert if a flash goes wrong.[/quote]

As I understood it the 6000 series has a lock so you can't easily tamper with the bios, it's some check or signature though I do not know much about it.

My earlier GPU was a 6970 MSI Lighting but as usual it appears they sell out the older models first so the one I got had the bios issue where it uses a standard 6970 bios under the MSI Lighting name and signature.

The problem with this is that the voltage values are incorrect as is other configs like for fan values and such, not just the memory and core clock speeds.

My first attempt was to find the MSI 6970 original bios and flash to that which is what others with this problem had done to solve this situation however the flash worked just fine but the card couldn't handle these new values so it lead to a lot of artifacts and stability issues, thus I switched to the second bios - this card has three by default, one standard and one with unlocked multipliers for overclocking and one for zero-core / liquid nitrogen cooling with more extreme values - however there was no second bios installed so the GPU wouldn't work at all with that switch and the third one just caused a black screen though the GPU otherwise appeared to work (Which is standard, that bios requires separate equipment and should never be used by normal users.) so I switched to the original bios and tried to load the backup I had done but that didn't work at all and just crashed the program, apparently a bug in that bios editor I used which was later rectified (Improved compatibility on newer GPU models.) so instead I tried to compare both of these files and modified the bios file I had downloaded to sort-of clock it down a bit, which of course led to a BSOD during boot-up as the GPU didn't accept these modifications due to the bios being locked.

I managed to revert back to the original bios via a boot loader but the GPU more or less died after a few days since it couldn't handle those settings in the first place.

This was for my previous system however and I had already started ordering parts for this new system by then so I simply made a order for this 7970 and got rid of the 6970 I had earlier since warranty isn't covered with bios modifications.
(My sister got the old computer and the 4970 2GB Vapor-X I had before the 6970, not exactly as planned but it still worked well enough.)

It's a learning experience, I could have tried warranty and RMA but I imagine it wouldn't have worked in the first place since the bios differed to begin with.

I couldn't find the posts since a lot of searches now lead to the 7970 lighting but I found some stuff about it.

http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=348851

Also found out later that the 6970 lighting was very sensitive and prone to failure, overall things were a bit problematic for a time but it's good to have learned a bit more about it.
(I didn't know the 6000 series had a locked bios - seems the 7000 doesn't have it either - and I didn't know that particular GPU was so sensitive or that the bios issue so common for the first batch of those GPU's.)


EDIT: Actually had a similar problem with old components and delivery with this current PSU, apparently the old models are prone to having the fan controller failing (It's harmless as such - they just go a top speed all the time actually improving cooling - but they get really loud.) which was fixed in a newer batch in 2011 I think it was but I had to exchange the PSU twice to get one that worked correctly without this issue and for others it has taken more than that to get those models, heh.
( https://www.google.co.uk/#hl=en&sclient=psy-ab&q=corsair+ax1200+fan+noise&oq=corsair+ax1200+fan+noise&gs_l=hp.3..0.212037.216260.4.216374.24.15.0.9.9.0.117.940.12j3.15.0...0.0...1c.eZz8xXvx50w&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_qf.,cf.osb&fp=9f5b3a513b63364d&biw=1627&bih=861 )