We stumbled upon a rather interesting forum discussion over at Overclockers.co.uk forums regarding the Powercolor Radeon R9 290 OC which was supposedly unlocked into a full Radeon R9 290X by simply replacing a GPU BIOS. It appears that the user managed to get all 2816 Stream Processors and 176 Texture Units, at least according to GPU-Z screenshots and benchmarks.

The story originates from PC Games Hardware forums where a member, Speedy1612, managed to "unlock" its own Power R9 290 OC graphics card into a full Radeon R9 290X by simply replacing the GPU BIOS. The procedure is quite painless as the R9 290 already has a dual-BIOS and according to benchmark results, flashed R9 290 is much faster, even more faster than it should be just with a minor clock adjustment.

According to the video posted by Speedy1612, he used ASUS' R9 290X BIOS for his modification and it is still not clear if the results are real and some R9 290 graphics cards are actually unlockable. Of course, it just might be a small batch from Powercolor, but in any case it appears that it is indeed possible, at least until proven wrong.

We grabbed some pictures and the video while the rest of the details can be found via link to PCGamesHardware.de below.








Source: PCGamesHardware.de.