Video card upgrade

BlindObject said:

I was looking into the 6950s cards which seem to be able to unlock to 6970. Is this easy to accomplish? Are there any risks?

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Yes. But since unlocking the shaders add's only a marginal boost to performance and the 6950's vRAM is the older 5Gb variety- not the 6Gb IC's that are found on the 6970- then you can run into the possibility of render problems
Although you're probably best to either unlock the shaders only (BIOS hack) and manually overclock the core and memory, or just conventional overclocking using Afterburner or vendor supplied OC'ing software (SmartDoctor/TriXX etc.).
Be aware that some non-reference cards don't seem to take a flash from a modded BIOS.

BlindObject said:

On the green side I was looking into a pair of either GTX470s or GTX560 Tis.

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Both setups would offer very good performance -not as good as CF'ed 6950's, although it depends on what kind of price you are paying. As an example; locally it is cheaper for me to buy two GTX480's + two aftermarket coolers (Prolimatech MK-13 or AC Accelero Xtreme Plus) and upgrade a PSU (if required) than buy two 6950's (or GTX570's). So it pretty much depends on pricing and what levels of game IQ you are happy with.

Excellent. I love the whole unlocking business, it's very interesting. I've had bad luck with it, however. As you probably know some of the versions of GTX465s were able to unlock to full GTX470s, or a small boost from custom bios. But unfortunately my card were not able to have either, even though I had the black PCB, my chip wasn't unlockable. How do I find the reference design of the cards? As I see in the link, most cards are able to unlock without issues.

You're probably best to short list the cards available to you then Google something like [vendor model] shader/6970 unlock or similar. I think virtually all reference cards would unlock (the stock rectangular shroud+ blower fan), but I note that some 1Gb cards and second revision (non-reference) boards -mostly those without a BIOS switch are usually the problematic ones. Newer XFX/MSI boards seem to crop up more frequently than most in tech help sites- but I would suggest you refine your research once you have a list of available SKU's that interest you.

As far as I know the only large scale model of GTX465 that was unlockable to GTX 470 was an initial batch that were rushed out to meet the launch deadline (mainly EVGA/Asus/Palit/PoV)