Not the same time frame, but it reminded me of the hack to make consumer GeForce Nvidia cards appear to be their overpriced, professional, Quadro counterparts:

https://www.eevblog.com/forum/general-computing/hacking-nvid...

Those were the Pentium II, 233-333Mhz were all identical and could be pencil unlocked

IIRC some AMD too.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:AMD_Athlon_Pencil_Tr...

This probably sold a lot of extra CPUs.