Upgrading your Radeon RX 9070 to an XT version would be possible, but risky

The Radeon RX 9070 XT and RX 9070 recently launched by AMD share many features, especially their Navi 48 graphics chipset. There are differences in the number of computing units, but these two products are similar enough that it gives some people ideas: replace the vBIOS – which defines, among other things, all the characteristics of a graphics card such as operating frequencies, voltages, and power limits – of the basic version with that of the XT model, in the hope of improving its performance. And it seems to work!

Flashing the vBIOS, an operation that is not without risk

The experience is of course not without risks, and it is entirely possible to brick your graphics card during handling, that is to say, render it completely inoperative; Needless to say, trying to get a Radeon under warranty whose original vBIOS has been modified or replaced is likely to be complicated. However, a member of the PC Games Hardware forum tried it and reported successfully updating the vBIOS of his Asus Radeon RX 9070 Prime to that of the XT version from the same manufacturer, an operation made easier by the fact that the two cards share the same design.

If this does not reactivate “by Even though the compute units were disabled, the modification still allowed the card's Boost frequency to be increased to 3.1 GHz (compared to 2.5 GHz for the original Radeon RX 9070). The power consumption limit, meanwhile, increases from 220 watts to 317 watts, a value similar to that of the Asus Radeon RX 9070 XT Prime when it leaves the factory. In practice, the performance of this modded RX 9070 increases by around 15%, even allowing it to overtake its big sister in certain 3DMark benchmark tests.

	Radeon RX 9070 XT	Radeon RX 9070
GPU	Navi 48 XTX	Navi 48	3584
Boost Frequency	~2.97 GHz	~2.52 GHz
Memory	16 GB GDDR6	16 GB GDDR6
Memory bus	256-bit	256-bit
Memory speed	20 Gbps	20 Gbps
Memory bandwidth	640 GB/s	640 GB/s
Maximum consumption	304W	220W
PCIe interface	PCIe 5.0×16	PCIe 5.0×16

Let us remember once again that this type of modification, while interesting, is nonetheless risky; in this case, the Radeon RX 9070 flashed with a different vBIOS was not completely stable, and some bugs persist when the card is idle.

Source: PC Games Hardware Forum