Flashing BIOS of a higher-end GPU onto a less powerful SKU from the same GPU family is not a novel concept. However, it can enable massive performance uplift thanks to the more relaxed approach to power and frequency. This is exactly what u/noVa_realiZe did and posted on r/Radeon subreddit. Accordin...
  • AnyOldName3@lemmy.worldEnglish
    4·
    3 days ago

    The comments on the article are pretty illuminating:

    • Unlike BIOS transplant mods of the past, this doesn’t enable any disabled cores (which would likely have been disabled due to manufacturing defects) as they’re physically fused off rather than controlled by software. It just increases the power limit, which you can do with the stock BIOS anyway.
    • The before and after comparison is inflated due to abnormally poor results on the stock BIOS, and the gain is much less impressive when comparing to an average RX 9070. If I had to guess, maybe the user had previously been meddling with settings and one of them hurt performance, but the reflash restored it to its default.
    • Because of the different power limits, RX 9070 XT cards typically have much beefier cooling and power delievery than a non-XT RX 9070, so going for the power limit of the bigger card is pushing things in a way that’s likely a bad idea.

    The XT card has more cores, so using its power limit on the non-XT card means more power draw from each core, so it’s pushing things further than they’d be on the XT card. That’s probably an especially bad idea given that it’s already lower-binned silicon to start with.

    • who@feddit.orgEnglish
      3·
      2 days ago

      so going for the power limit of the bigger card is pushing things in a way that’s likely a bad idea.

      And to be clear, “bad idea” means your graphics card is likely to die early. Components pushed hard for long tend to fail, and these things are generally pushed hard even at stock settings.