[section_title title=”Overclocking”]
Overclocking
With the R7 360 being on the lower echelon of graphics cards for grunt, every little bit of extra performance squeezed out could be the difference between playable frame rates and fps stutter. Anyone expecting great things from a low powered, £89.99 graphics card probably either has a severe case of delusion, or they like to bet on the underdog; underdogs sometimes win! While AMD Crimson does feature its own overclocking utility, we prefer to use MSI Afterburner where possible as this is not only the staple of VGA overclocking, but it allows for better tweaking such as voltage control.
It should be noted that this particular samples voltage controls were locked and even with Afterburners unlock/extreme overclocking tweaks, the voltage remained locked. That being said, I did manage a nice overclock of around 13.8% on the graphics core; a total increase from 1100MHz to 1251MHz. On the memory, this was obviously less of an increase of 4.6% which equates to a maximum overclock on the memory of 1700MHz. On paper, the increases look very tasty indeed, but below is how the increases crossover into performance gains…
Although the increase in the MSI R7 360’s overclock doesn’t translate into a full blown switch to performance, we did find that relative performance ranges from 4%-9% depending on the benchmark. The most gains came from synthetic benchmarks such as 3DMark 11, but in BioShock Infinite at maximum settings, this was a little lower. Overall, not a bad jump in performance it could be the saving grace of this card; it doesn’t match up to an R7 370 though even with an overclock which is very disappointing.
