14 DAY TRIAL // Last week, rumors surfaced about the possibility to change the BIOS of the Radeon R9 290 graphics card to that of the R9 290X, thus effectively making it possible to acquire the latter for $400 / €400 instead of $549 / €549.
We weren't totally convinced it was for real though, but it turns out it actually was. It is, in the end, possible for some XFX, PowerColor, Club3D and VTX3D boards to be thus upgraded.
In fact, the folks at Overclockers UK actually ran with the idea and took the VTX3D Radeon R9 290 X-Edition (and on that note, the name has taken a whole new meaning now) and flashed it to R9 290X.
OCUK are actually offering the flashed VTX3D adapter for sale, with a 2-year warranty but the same price of $400 / €400 / £359.99.
And it's all because TUL Corporation, VTX3D's master company, didn't get enough Hawaii Pro GPUs on time, so it had to use the better Hawaii XT chips instead, but with the 290 BIOS.
The modified BIOS will unlock all Stream processors, bringing the SP count from 2,560 SPs. In the meantime, the 176 texture units are activated as well, up from the normal 160.
For those who want to make a clear comparison between the two, we may as well provide the specs of the cards.
First off, the Radeon R9 290 has 4 GB of GDDR5 VRAM at 5 GHz clock and 512-bit memory interface, leading to a bandwidth of 320 GB/s.
The Hawaii Pro GPU works at 947 MHz and features 160 TMUs, 604 ROPs, 40 CUs (Compute Units) and four display outputs (2x DVI, 1x HDMI, 1x DisplayPort).
The Radeon R9 29X, meanwhile, is a product with a Hawaii XT GPU working at 1 GHz, 4 GB of GDDR5 VRAM with memory clock of 5 GHz and the same 512-bit interface and 320 GB/s bandwidth as above.
There are 176 TMUs though, as well as 64 ROPs and 44 CUs, plus the same video output layout. Keep in mind that the TDP goes from 250 W to 300 W too.