As far as AMD cards are concerned, there’s a little bit of tinkering to be done, since it’s possible to flash a non-XT RX 9070 into an XT RX 9070. The operation was carried out successfully on an ASUS Prime model. However, the operation is not guaranteed, nor is stability, and the deactivated parts of the GPU cannot be reactivated.
RX 9070 flashed as RX 9070 XT!
As it happens, if you do your homework, you can flash a non-XT version of the card with the bios of an XT version. This allows the card to operate at the same frequencies as its big sister, which means a serious gain in frequency, but also in power consumption.
By default, the non-XT version of the card operates at a turbo frequency of 2610 MHz for a TDP of 220W. By flashing it with the XT bios, you can increase its frequency to 3010 MHz, but power consumption also rises – you don’t get something for nothing.
In terms of performance, the benchmark figures inevitably increase. It’s even possible to catch up with or even surpass the XT version of the card if you add a layer of overclocking on top of that.
However, you should bear in mind that this manipulation does not reactivate compute units that have been deactivated. Although both cards share the same GPU, a number of compute units have been deactivated: 8 compute units and 512 stream processors. Yes, we’re no longer in the days of the HD 6950 and HD 6970, when flashing a 6950 enabled the deactivated units on the HD 6970 to be reactivated. The units in question are now deactivated in hardware.
Be that as it may, the operation is interesting and may give some people ideas… Provided you’re prepared to risk your warranty.
