Previously, some AMD graphics cards could be unlocked at flashed to a more powerful version and now it appears that ASUS Radeon R9 Fury Strix is an another graphics card on that list and might become a best seller during holiday season due to this "hidden" and new feature, where you would practically get additional performance by unlocking additional stream processors.

While this will most certainly be limited to a certain batch of the graphics cards and to certain regions, it is still a free upgrade if you can unlock th R9 Fury Strix to 4096 stream processors. The 2good4you user at XtremeSystem forums was able to fully unlock its ASUS R9 Fury Strix and even have a decent overclocking potential, pushing its unlocked ASUS Radeon R9 Fury to 1050MHz for the GPU with GPU voltage set at 1.19V and even 1150MHz at 1.3v and maximum fan speed.

A user on Overclock.net even released a tool that both reads active and disabled CU units on Hawaii, Tonga and Fiji GPUs and enable them if necessary.

There are a few reasons why a certain batch of graphics cards would be unlockable. The first one is a yield issue as some of the chips do not survive the lithographic process and those chips, with less CUs, which are usually disabled by either a soft lock or a more permanent laser cutting.

The second reason, which is probably why certain ASUS Fury R9 Strix graphics card can be unlocked is attributed to a temporary supply issue as sometime, when AIB partners do not have enough graphics cards on the market, use fully-enabled GPUs which are software disabled in order to cope with the demand. A similar thing happened with the Radeon R9 290X.

It could be the case that ASUS Radeon R9 Fury Strix is the one to be looking for in case you are shopping for Radeon R9 Fury this holiday season as there is a big chance you will be able to simply unlock it to Radeon R9 Fury X.







Source: via Wccftech.com.