One of the readers of the PC Games Hardware portal told about an experiment in which he successfully installed the firmware of the Radeon RX 9070 XT video card on a more affordable Radeon RX 9070 model. Thanks to this, the younger video card increased its power limit and increased the GPU clock speeds.
Image source: ASUS
While this modification did not unlock the Radeon RX 9070’s compute units, the increased power limit and clock speeds had a significant impact on its performance. With the new firmware, the Radeon RX 9070 delivers performance levels that are almost on par with the RX 9070 XT, which has a GPU with more execution units. However, the older model can still be faster due to the additional 512 stream processors and additional overclocking.
Using the firmware from the RX 9070 XT model on the RX 9070 video card allowed the performance of the younger card to be increased by 18%, 19% and 16% in the 3DMark Steel Nomad, Port Royal and SpeedWay tests, respectively.
It is noted that although the modified card shows itself stable in games, its operation in idle mode cannot yet be called smooth, probably due to the high clock speeds of the GPU. However, this problem can be fixed by future updates and optimizations.