This is probably your first and only chance to buy Radeon R9 290X for a price of R9 290 safely.
Overclockers UK secured a batch of unlockable VTX3D R9 290s, and now they are offering them pre-flashed with 2 year warranty.
When the first rumors appeared about Hawaii XT GPUs being used instead of Hawaii PROs, nobody seemed to believe it. I wasn’t really convinced myself, all we had were some synthetic benchmarks and few people who successfully made this mod. Apparently everything was true, some cards from XFX, PowerColor, Club3D and VTX3D are confirmed to unlock into full R9 290X. It seems that TUL Corporation did not receive enough Hawaii PRO GPUs on time, so they used Hawaii XT instead with R9 290 BIOS. Now some of you are able to revert this process.
OCUK:
Pre-flashed by Overclockers UK Technicians using an voltage unlocked R290X BIOS unlocking the additional stream processors, giving a total of 2816 stream processors. Also voltage unlocked as well and with a full guarantee and warranty.
This modification unlocks all 2816 Stream Processors and 176 Texture Units, improving performance by 3 to 5% in comparison to R9 290 with 2560 SPs clocked at 1GHz.
By the way the name for VTX3D R9 290 X-Edition seems to make much more sense now ;)
VTX3D R9 290 vs R9 290 pre-flashed to R9 290X @ 1000MHz Core / 5000MHz Memory
As you can see R9 290 flashed to R9 290X offers around 4% better performance, and this is at the same clock as reference R9 290X. Do you need more proof? Check the links below for more information.
Links:
- [Overclockers.co.uk] ** VTX3D R9 290 PRE-FLASHED TO R9 290X & VOLTAGE UNLOCKED!! **
- [Overclock.net] [VC] PowerColor Radeon R9 290X unlocked into R9 290X
- [Overclock.net] R9 290X -> 290X Unlock Thread
P.S. We are not affiliated with OCUK :)