[section_title title=Overclocking]Overclocking
Overclocking is one of my favorite parts of testing products such as motherboards, CPU’s and graphics cards because to me, squeezing as much performance out as humanely possible gives me a buzz which other things just cannot. With that being said, the latest AMD cards and especially the R7/R9 range seem to be voltage locked with the exception of the odd model. Obviously some overclockers will be disheartened with this but obviously this is a review of the card at hand and not an overall look at AMDs processes.
The MSI R7 260x graphics card has stock clocks of 1175MHz on the core with a 1500MHz clock speed on the memory; I have illustrated this with a GPU-Z screenshot below:
To overclock the MSI R7 260x, I used MSI’s own graphics card overclocking utility; aptly named MSI Afterburner. As previously mentioned, a lot of AMD cards have had their voltage locked since the good old days and this particular sample was no different. I was however able to increase the power limit up by 20% which allows a higher TDP and pushes more power through the card which should technically allow it to overclock better.
When clocking this particular card, I found I could get quite far on the core, even up to 1300MHz on stock volts with the power boost but I found to be slightly unstable; especially for benchmarks like Unigine Heaven/Valley so I decided to find the sweet spot for this; cards that pass Heaven usually pass everything else!
With this particular sample, I easy managed to achieve stable clocks of 1234MHz on the core and 1608MHz on the memory which is quite reasonable considering the lack of voltage control available.
How will it actually compare to stock though in terms of performance? Let’s get on with the testing…
