AMD Radeon R9-290X review - Dual BIOS Switch Positions

What About That Dual BIOS Switch, Hilbert?

The AMD Radeon R9-290X comes flashed with two separate BIOSed for testing. The bios can be toggled by the small black switch located on the top of the part closest to the mounting bracket that you plug your displays into. You must reboot after toggling the switch for changes to take effect.

The switches modes are as follows;

• “Quiet Mode” – Bios position one. Switch is in position closest to where you plug in your displays. This mode is designed to optimally suit a gamer that wants to keep a tight lid on acoustics. If you do not play with headphones, you do not have a high end gaming chassis, or your room’s ambient noise level is extremely low this may be the mode for you.
• “Uber Mode” – Bios position two. Switch is in position furthest away to where you plug in your displays

The Uber mode is designed to perform optimally under all performance and game testing. This includes crossfire. 

If you are in Uber mode you het a higher TDP limit which helps in manual overclock, you should also get more Voltage limit for your OC and you will have fixed clocks (without Boost). As such in normal QUIET mode the GPU is switching clocks between 800 base and 1 GHz max clocks based on TDP / Power limiter / Temp envelopes. On average  you'll see the GPUS clock anywhere at  920-960 MHz. 

During our testing we found that the Uber mode does not add enough performance to be significant as the power limiters kick in just as hard. As such we recommend the Quiet mode as in Uber mode the noise level increases as well. For the remainder of the tests we use the card's default settings, BIOS 1 quiet mode.

Okay, are you guys ready? Let's startup the benchmarks :)