So yesterday after posting our RX 570 and 580 reviews some questions have risen on the fact if the the 470/480 and be flashed towards the 570/580. This seems to be a correct assumption as a Guru3D member flashed his Radeon RX 470 succesfullty towards the RX 570.
Most board partners use the very same PCB design they used for the 400 series. And since the Device ID remaines the same, just the Subsystem Id was changed. That opens up the possibility to flash the graphis card. The GPUs might be newer, but they are more of the same yet binned for higher clocks. Yesterday in our forums user BigMaMaInHouse already flashed his radeon RX 470 towards the RX 570, and he did so successfully. Check the thread and posts here.
Now he has a Sapphire Nitro+ RX 470 and he flashed it towards the Nitro+ 570 with nothing more then ATIFlash and the firmware. Once he applied a, atiflash -p 0 Bios.rom -f to force (download) the flash it was done. This worked fine, his temperatures are higher as it seems, but the card is fully working and performing. Nothing a fan profile cannot deal with.
So above our Time Spy GPU score, and below in the screenshot his GPU score on 3DMark Time Spy. It is nearly spot on with ours, despite the fact he uses a Core i3 processor and we make use of a far more serious Core i7 8-core proc - thus all this is indicative of that GPU score being impressive - we can say that the tweak/flash definitely works.
Be advised and warned though - Some cards like the Nitro series graphic cards have a dual BIOS, so he or maybe you have a fail-safe. Many other cards do not and that poses a serious risk. Should you want to give it a go, be warned as failure is an option. Albeit sometimes you can get lucky we do not recommend usage of cross-brand firmwares as if your ASUS board has a different Voltage regulator opposed to your MSI one, you would be in trouble. Hey if you brick it, do not blame anybody else but yourself.
Also, the colleagues from TPU just reported the same thing, one of their forum users flashed a RX 480 successfully towards the RX 580. This was a XFX RX 480 graphics card (has dual-bios as well) but he used the BIOS from a Sapphire RX 580 Limited Edition. Hey if it works, it's a free and simple upgrade. If not, the Nitro or XFX card can switch back to the original BIOS easily. In closing one thing I like to add, the GPUs might be the same, but that doesn't mean they haven't been binned. E.g. sorted for best ASIC quality and low leakage. Success is not guaranteed, hence make sure you backup your old BIOS.
# rehash
