14 DAY TRIAL // There was a little friction in regards to the AMD Radeon R9 290 graphics card recently, due to the apparent max fan speed of 40%, so Sapphire figured it may as well release a new BIOS.
Before, since the fan never reached the top speed (it stayed slower in order to be quieter and avoid wearing itself down too fast), the GPU Boost technology could never quite go all the way, due to heat.
The new BIOS will raise the max speed from 40% to 47%, which, Sapphire says, “offers the user the best compromise for enhanced performance, noise and reliability.”
It's really the same BIOS AMD released a while back, the one that some people still felt wasn't good enough, believing that the max fan speed should be raised to 50% to truly avoid heat-induced GPU clock throttling.
Fortunately, the Radeon R9 290 is pretty strong even without dynamic overclocking, so that 3% shouldn't impact things much, if at all.