In the past we have seen cases where you have been able to flash AMD graphics cards to their higher versions in their class. The last time we saw this was with the R9 290 being able to be flashed to the R9 290X. The way this works is the when AMD makes the cards in the series they disable certain compute units (CUs). If you are lucky these CUs have been disabled using a soft-mod. If that is the case you can use the newly developed CUINFO software developed by OCN forum member tx12. It has shown some success unlocking disabled CUs in AMD graphics cards based on Figi, Hawaii and Tonga chips.
The success of this is really based on how AMD has disabled the CUs on your card. They actually use two methods to disable CUs, the first is the soft-mod we talked about which is just disabling them in the firmware. The second is by actually laser-cutting them. Using the tool you are given an output that looks something like this:
Adapters detected: 1
Card #1 PCI ID: 1002:7300 – 174B:E329
DevID [7300] Rev [CB] (0), memory config: 0x00000000 (unused)
Fiji-class chip with 16 compute units per Shader Engine
SE1 hw/sw: 00030000 / 00000000 […………..xx]
SE2 hw/sw: 40010000 / 00000000 [.x………….x]
SE3 hw/sw: 00030000 / 00000000 […………..xx]
SE4 hw/sw: 00030000 / 00000000 […………..xx]
56 of 64 CUs are active. HW locks: 8 (R/W) / SW locks: 0 (R/W).
8 CU’s are disabled by HW lock, override is possible at your own risk.
This output shows that are able to unlock some of the CU’s. Tx12 has also developed a script that will generate three different ROMs to flash your card. You have to remember that more than likely Fiji PROs are based on defective chips so some Compute Units are broken and will not be able to be unlocked.
Cards that have been flashed successfully have shown a performance increase so that is proof this tool and method do work.
Source: OCN Forums, VideoCardz | News Archive
