A few days ago one of the German party forums said that was able to successfully unlock all the stream processors on the graphics card Radeon R9 290 brand PowerColor by the BIOS firmware from the video card Radeon R9 290X. Previously it was thought that such tricks are impossible by blocking the extra functional units in the graphics processors at the hardware level.
We have found that some video cards Radeon R9 290 really turns into a Radeon R9 290X after updating BIOS, but so far it is only the products sold under the trademarks Corporation TUL (PowerColor, Club3D, VTX3D) and XFX. It is important to understand that the unlockable cards have a reference design.
Another important note: if TUL find that delivered during the warranty claim, video card Radeon R9 290 out of order as a result of a failed attempt to flash the BIOS from Radeon R9 290X, then the case will be considered non-warranty. For this reason, a British store sell converted Radeon R9 290 with two-year warranty offered by the store personally. Said the store managed to get a lot of video cards Radeon R9 290 brand VTX3D, which is a sufficiently high probability of being transformed into Radeon R9 290X. Preparing a special BIOS version, on turning one card to another are also offered the opportunity to increase the core voltage up to 1,412 V. The upgraded video card thus demonstrates 2816 stream processors and a default frequency of 1000/5000 MHz.