BIOS modding in the GPU scene was quite popular back then, and some lucky owners can extract more performance out of their cards for free, albeit this comes with the risk of running into unforeseen bugs and failures. That didn’t stop the modding efforts done by the members of PC Games Hardware forums (via Videocardz), with the AMD’s Radeon RX 9070 given extra juice to punch above its weight.
RX 9070 + RX 9070 XT’s vBIOS = Fast Card
While the stock RX 9070 comes with a measly 220W TBP (or 245W TBP if you have OC versions), flashing the XT’s vBIOS into this card will amp it up to over 300 watts, as evidenced by the screenshot above. Reportedly, the card had no issues running the XT vBIOS at stock, and it netted a 15-20% improvement in performance compared to the stock non-XT card when its overclocked (which is pretty close to a real XT card). Further optimizations done on the card made it surpass the performance of reference RX 9070 XT models, which is impressive.
One reason this effort is possible comes down to the similarities of both RX 9070 GPUs: the RX 9070 non-XT is simply a cut-down version of the RX 9070 XT on the same silicon (Navi 48), while the memory specs are identical, making it one less hurdle to go through while performing such modifications. Other prerequisites include using vBIOS from non-OC XT cards to increase the chance of successful modding, as power demands on the overclocked XT models may be too much for a regular non-XT card to handle.
Still, BIOS modding in this day and age is harder than ever due to lockdowns from GPU vendors, so it’s not often we can see cards be modified in this way to extract more performance. All things considered though, it’s an impressive effort, even if modding to such extent is often impractical for daily use these days.
Pokdepinion: It’s almost like unlocking extra cores in AMD Athlon CPUs back then.
