i recently started to wounder if i could bios flash my r9 290 to a 290x so i poked around duckduckgo and found a few posts about it being done at launch with a reference board. i figured if i was possible at launch then why not in full scale production. got the tools to check my board to see if i it was even possible. results were promising so i flashed it and rebooted and i was able to unlock it to a full sapphire 290x trixx oc :)
somethimes it works other times it doesnt.
it highly depends where the disabled units are.
OCN has a realy nice topic about it going.
But the biggest question will be, if the card runs without issues?
Most of the times those units getting disabled because they didnt work probably after production proces.
I have read a couple of comments from users who have flashed their cards, but ran into issues while playing games.
So its just a matter of luck.
Also not all cards can be unlocked, the "tool" will tell you, if it can or not.
Most of the time its a NO.
to add on to @MisteryAngel's comment. what are you doing this for exactly? if you're gaming, honestly you'd be an idiot to do something like this. simply because gaming performance between a 290 and 290x is next to negligible. now if you are doing this to unlock the extra shaders and stream processors so you can have a better card for editing and actual work. it would be a nice experiment. BUT be aware it's your own fault if you brick your card. which something like this IS a hit and a miss.
Interesting, is it stable and does it perform to 290x levels in games? I checked my 290s with the utility that was floating around recently, and it said that both of them were hardware locked (so, laser-cut) which would make unlocking impossible so I didn't check it any further. I guess risk isn't all that high since you have a dual BIOS anyway, but at the end of the day that's your choice.
did it for fun to see if it would work. and it did and its stable. haven't fully tested performance to see if it matches a factory 290x. was not worried about bricking it seeing as i have dual bios and could recover from a bad flash with out issue.