Flashing BIOS of a higher-end GPU onto a less powerful SKU from the same GPU family is not a novel concept. However, it can enable massive performance uplift thanks to the more relaxed approach to power and frequency. This is exactly what u/noVa_realiZe did and posted on r/Radeon subreddit. According to the post, the user flashed AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT BIOS onto his PowerColor RX 9070 non-XT SKU. This has yielded a considerable performance increase, driving the 3DMark Steel Nomad benchmark from 5,821 points at stock, non-flashed GPU to 6,461 points, which is approximately an 11% increase. With additional tweaks and settings, such as increasing the power limit with the XT BIOS and adjusting memory configurations, the user achieved a score of up to 7,277 points in the same benchmark. This represents a remarkable 25% increase over the base result, with the non-XT card achieving nearly a quarter of its performance improvement through a few tweaks.

In real-world gaming, the card only managed to gain roughly 8-12% uplift over the stock SKU, showing the decoupling from the synthetic tests. It is very likely that the longer-term thermal stress from the prolonged gaming sessions is causing this lower performance increase, sustaining lower clocks compared to the relatively short-term load from synthetic benchmarks. The entire cause of this FPS increase is the enhanced power limit, which increases the non-XT 220 W board power to as much as 300 W, representing a roughly 36% power increase on its own. No additional cores/ROPs/TMUs are unlocked by flashing the XT BIOS. In fact, the entire process is very inefficient when comparing the power/performance of the stock non-XT SKU. However, if you are looking to extract the maximum performance from your GPU, this may be a viable option, provided you consider all the risks associated with running your GPU at its non-default settings. Sustained higher power settings can result in GPU degradation over time, and BIOS flashing is always a risky endeavor.