AMD has been known for making processors with locked and presumably defective cores that then could be unlocked to get more cores and hence more performance at no cost at all. This was the story with certain AMD AM3 processors that could be unlocked with a simple software mod, often found in the BIOS chips on certain motherboards. Well, the story continues now with AMD’s Radeon graphics cards. This should be big news for owners of such cards. We doubt AMD did it on purpose to gather more attention but the performance is there so get it if you can!
Here’s how things work – you must download a certain software program called CUINFO, which then checks if you have locked stream processors on the latest AMD graphics cards including Radeon 200 Series, Radeon 300 Series and Radeon R9 Fury. If you are lucky, you will be then able to enable the functional units that have been turned off and get more performance.
The trick does not work on all AMD video cards because the US company uses two methods to disable stream processors – by laser-cutting them and via firmware. If you have a card with compute units (CUs) that have been disabled via firmware, you are in business; if not, you are out of luck. In some cases you will not be able to unlock all the CUs that you can see since there are GPUs with damaged CUs that have been turned off. But there have been some lucky guys who have gotten all the stream processors a chip has and then enjoy more performance. According to unofficial information one guy even turned his Radeon R9 Fury into a Radeon R9 Fury X card, which is pretty sweet.
Here’s a link to the software and good luck!
Source: Techpowerup.com