AMD Radeon RX 9070 card gets 25% performance boost by flashing XT BIOS

It's a tale as old as time in the world of PC hardware: flashing the BIOS of a more powerful graphics card onto its weaker sibling to unlock more performance. A user on the Radeon subreddit has just done exactly that with the latest RDNA 4 hardware, successfully flashing an AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT BIOS onto their PowerColor RX 9070, and the results are pretty impressive.

The post from noVa_realiZe (via VideoCardz) shows that just the BIOS flash alone, with no other changes, resulted in a healthy 11% performance gain (from 5,821 points to 6,461 points) in the 3DMark Steel Nomad benchmark. However, after flashing the card, undervolting, and overclocking, the total increase over stock figures was 25%, with the score jumping from a stock 5,821 points to 7,277 points. In real-world gaming, however, the gains were more modest, with the user reporting an 8-12% uplift over the stock card after flashing the BIOS and tuning.

Another thing worth noting is that the power draw increase is significant. After flashing the BIOS, the board's power increased from the stock 220W to as high as 300W, a 36% increase in power consumption for that extra bit of gaming performance.

It's also important to remember that this mod doesn't unlock any extra GPU cores. It simply removes the artificial power and clock limits imposed on the non-XT model, making it significantly less power-efficient. While the results are tempting, it's a high-risk procedure, as a failed BIOS flash can permanently brick your graphics card. Moreover, running it at such high power levels for extended periods could also lead to faster degradation of the GPU silicon over time.

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KitGuru says: This is a good example of enthusiastic tinkering, but for most users, this isn't necessarily something you should attempt. A failed BIOS flash could turn your GPU into an expensive paperweight. 

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