AMD’s RX 9070 falls short of rivaling some of the best graphics cards. With fewer cores than the RX 9070 XT, but at just $50 less, the card seems like it may not have much of a place in the market — but it turns out that it has a lot of potential. With some modding magic, one user managed to make their RX 9070 rival the pricier XT version.
This was achieved by Gurdi on the PCGamesHardware forums. Although we know that overclocking the RX 9000 series brings good results, that alone can’t bring the RX 9070 non-XT on the same level as the XT model. The card simply has much worse specs than its sibling. The RX 9070 XT sports 4,096 cores, but the non-XT version cuts that down to 3,584. While they both run on the same Navi 48 GPU, one is bound to be significantly worse than the other.
So, since overclocking doesn’t cut it, what did the RX 9070 owner do? They modded the BIOS. What this means is that they used the RX 9070 XT BIOS with the non-XT version, effectively tricking the card into higher performance.
Flashing the card with a different BIOS brought tangible improvements. As the GPU in question was the Asus Prime RX 9070, Gurdi used the BIOS for the same Asus Prime variant, but in the XT version. Without being modded, the card pulled 2,140MHz to 2,610MHz with a 220-watt power draw, but things got a lot better after the boost, with the RX 9070 non-XT running at 2,480MHz to 3,030MHz. The power draw increased significantly, too, now sitting at 317 watts.
It’s worth noting that the non-XT and the XT card don’t share the same power connector; the XT version uses three 8-pin connectors, but the non-XT gets by with just two. Still, the user claims they were able to achieve a stable performance, but they have experienced issues on their way to that point.
Once overclocked, the RX 9070 achieved up to 20% higher performance in benchmarks compared to the stock, non-modded version of the GPU. Those are huge gains that put the card nearly at the same level as the RX 9070 XT.
Should you try this at home? I’d steer clear unless you’re familiar with the subject. A lot of things can go wrong and mods such as these may not be covered by the warranty. Still, it’s definitely fun to see, and with the RX 9070 XT sometimes hard to come by, this is one way that people can squeeze more performance out of their non-XT cards.
