There are many ways to increase the performance of your system in the form of an overclock, usually involving the actual raising of clocks. Once in a while however, an opportunity presents itself where you can simply add more clocks. A great example would be the triple-core AMD Phenon II processors which, with a bit of ingenuity could be transformed into a quad-core chip. A similar trick is now possible with AMD’s RX 460 graphics card. Der8auer has just published a guide and video that shows you the simple steps needed to up the card’s stream processor count from 896 units to 1024 units, a step that will offer a performance boost of around 12%.

“The AMD Radeon RX 460 unlocking process involves nothing more than a simple firmware update and can result in a performance upgrade of 12.5%. The Radeon RX 460 is considered a solid choice in terms of price/performance. It comes by default with 56 TMU and 896 Stream Processors in the form of the Polaris 11 GPU architecture. But here’s how to get an additional 8 TMUs and 128 Stream Processors.”

“Unlocking the RX 460 is pretty simple. It’s unclear why we’re able to do this. Has AMD locked the cards down on purpose, or are the yields not high enough to fulfill the Radeon RX 460 demand? Let us know in the comments what you think! Currently we can only provide the BIOS for the Sapphire Nitro 4G and the ASUS STRIX O4G. We’re working on testing more cards and if it works, we will upload more modified BIOS versions. In total we have tested 6 cards, each of which was able to unlock the shaders. We tested five ASUS STRIX O4G cards and managed to unlock all five of them.”

You can check out the full article from der8auer here on the Overclocking.Guide site which includes all the details and BIOS files you need to flash your RX 460 card. You can also check out this video where Roman explains everything to you in person.