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.
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.
In real-world gaming, the card only managed to gain roughly 8-12% uplift over the stock SKU, showing the decoupling from the synthetic tests. It is very likely that the longer-term thermal stress from the prolonged gaming sessions is causing this lower performance increase, sustaining lower clocks compared to the relatively short-term load from synthetic benchmarks. The entire cause of this FPS increase is the enhanced power limit, which increases the non-XT 220 W board power to as much as 300 W, representing a roughly 36% power increase on its own. No additional cores/ROPs/TMUs are unlocked by flashing the XT BIOS. In fact, the entire process is very inefficient when comparing the power/performance of the stock non-XT SKU. However, if you are looking to extract the maximum performance from your GPU, this may be a viable option, provided you consider all the risks associated with running your GPU at its non-default settings. Sustained higher power settings can result in GPU degradation over time, and BIOS flashing is always a risky endeavor.
